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Shoe and B.C., 3/26/13

Elementary school test questions as setups to jokes in comic strips: most played out cliché on the comics page, or mostest played out cliché on the comics page? I guess I shouldn’t complain about accuracy when the students being tested are anthropomorphic bird-people and/or sentient ants, but I do question the quality of instruction in the bird and ant educational systems. In Shoe, Skyler’s cynical, heavy-lidded expression in panel two shows that he understands what a bizarrely open-ended and unanswerable question he’s been presented with, presumably by whatever over-eager art teacher also thought that art puns based on a catchphrase from a 17-year-old movie would get elementary school kids enthusiastic about learning. The ant-child, meanwhile, in an act of defiance over what appears to be a test of his knowledge of old sayings that are actively incorrect, fills in the blanks with a plea for death. Frankly, these questions are both making a good case for a uniform, standardized testing regime with questions developed by government bureaucrats, if these are the locally-directed alternatives.

Mark Trail, 3/26/13

Maybe Mark does love Rusty after all? In order to perpetrate his completely misguided rescue scheme, he’s been forced to not verbalize a sentence he’s formed in his mind and confine it to a thought balloon instead, in what must be a superhuman effort on his part.

Spider-Man, 3/26/13

DAREDEVIL: “And that’s where attorney Matt Murdock comes in!”

SPIDER-MAN: “Wow! This I gotta see!”

[SEVEN HOURS AND HUNDREDS OF LEXISNEXIS SEARCHES LATER]

SPIDER-MAN: “Oh, man, was I ever wrong about this.”

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Shoe, 3/24/13

By all rights, the Perfesser drunkenly stumbling into the mysteriously open town mortuary in the middle of the night ought to be the set up for one of two things: A tale of spine-tingling horror, or a very specific genre of slash fiction. And yet we get neither! At least we should get corpses. Mort is standing there with elbow-length rubber gloves, for rooting around inside corpses! And there are open coffins everywhere. Why are there no corpses?

Spider-Man, 3/24/13

Among Daredevil’s amazing powers: superhuman tact! “So, Peter, in addition to being a costumed crime-fighter, I’m also a successful, highly paid lawyer! What do you do for a living?” “I’m a freelance photographer for a print newspaper!” “Okay! Then let’s, uh, let’s talk about superhero stuff.”

Panel from Slylock Fox, 3/24/13

um also you guys he’s right over there behind the tree BEHIND YOU YOU CAN LIKE TOTALLY SEE HIM

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Mark Trail, 3/9/13

OK, fine, I’ve been ignoring it all week, but yes, Rusty was snooping around Rod Bassy’s van and saw the cheating-at-fishing equipment and got caught and now has been tied up, and, I mean, it’s hilarious and all but it’s not exactly a surprise, is it? The best part here is that Rod Bassy is reacting to the fact that his friend/accomplice Catfish has, you know, forcibly kidnapped a child with irritation that this will complicate his plan to rig the outcome of yet another bass fishing tournament, rather than with mounting panic and despair a là William H. Macy in Fargo. I mean, really, the tied-up little boy is in a van with Rod’s name painted in enormous letters on the side! You know, there’s a reason child kidnappers usually use vehicles without distinguishing marks.

Mary Worth, 3/9/13

Carlos Alora is the Charterstone groundskeeper and he hasn’t been seen in years, like, not since I started reading this strip in 2002 or thereabouts. Now they’re misspelling his name, which is more insulting than just dropping him down the memory hole. JUSTICE FOR CARLOS! WE CAN HEAR THE DOUBLE L WHEN YOU PRONOUNCE IT, MARY!

Shoe, 3/9/13

Man, can you believe it’s been four years since the rebooted Star Trek movie came out? Which means it’s probably been about three and a half years that Shoe’s been sitting on this joke, but now at last it’s relevant! Wasn’t it worth the wait? (No, no it wasn’t.)

Six Chix, 3/9/13

“Good lord, that was a filthy fuckfest, in every sense of the word! I had sex with a lot of men that weekend, but your father was the only one whose name I learned. Of course, that was only after we had done it five or six times. Hey, where are you going?”