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Shoe, 4/4/12

If your job was to draw the sad, slouched-over bird-men of Shoe cracking wise every day of your life (your life which lasts forever, due to some deal you made with the devil ages ago), would you maybe get a little bored? Maybe to spice things up a bit, you would draw things from the perspective of some scuttling creature, one that clings to the ceiling, looking down on the bird-man as he sits way too close to the TV but leans in closer to watch it anyway. Then the creature drops down on the floor, and you can see that it’s no mere insect, it’s enormous, tall enough to look the bird-man right in the eyes, right in those sad, weary eyes. “Oh, hello,” the bird-man says, resigned to his no doubt gruesome fate. “I’ve been expecting you.”

Mary Worth, 4/4/12

“Still, while we may have left our youth behind, I’ve still got plenty of manly chest hair, right? Right? Want me to pull at my shirt so you can see a bit more of it? Yes? No?”

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Shoe, 3/7/12

OK, I know it’s tricky to try to read the expressions bird-people, but Roz’s heavy-lidded look in panel two strikes me as quite sad; that, combined with the finality of “I never had children”, makes the strip poignant. Do you think Roz is feeling maudlin and ruminating about the family life she never had, or that she’s thinking about her theoretical child being hurled to its death because she left it on top of her car?

In other news, Roz apparently says “OMG” aloud, which, LOL.

Family Circus, 3/7/12

In the generally edgeless and saccharine world of the Keane Kompound, it can be easy to forget that, in an act of long-ago whimsy, the more popular of the Keane family dogs was given the hilariously disgusting name “Barfy.” But then you have panels like this, where the kids cheerfully talk about being constantly covered with Barfy-slobber, and suddenly it’s a fact that seems very unsettling.

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Gil Thorp, 2/9/12

Guys, it’s all been fun and games watching the Mudlark basketball team defile their tender young flesh with heathen tattoos, but what about the lesson? It’s not a Gil Thorp plot without a lesson. Today, we learn that lesson: Unlike your dad, who couldn’t handle the fact that your mom made more money than him at her fancy bank job and ran off with the 19-year-old who works at the Arby’s out on Route 128, a tattoo will never leave you!

Shoe, 2/9/12

“That’s right! It took multiple painful experimental surgeries, but the mammalian cells have finally been successfully grafted onto my scalp and now I’m growing real hair, not just feathers like you! These few scraggly hairs mean everything to me! I’m a monstrous chimera, but I don’t care, do you hear me? I don’t care!”

Mary Worth, 2/9/12

I’m warning you right now: The temptation to just run, without comment of any kind, all the Mary Worth strips in which Nola gleefully describes her sexual depravity and Mary reels in horror is very, very strong, and I don’t know if I can resist it much longer.