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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/16/11

I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve seen Jughaid’s haid without his omnipresent coonskin hat, and what a disturbing sight it is! Horror aside, though, this comic implies that perhaps I’ve been too hard on the residents of Hootin’ Holler over the years; after all, that shallow brainpan and those protruding brow ridges indicate that the town is populated by a lost tribe of Homo habilis, and frankly rather than criticizing their primitive lifestyle we ought to be impressed by how close their civilization comes to the one created by anatomically modern humans.

Shoe, 2/16/11

I’ve become something of a connoisseur of Shoe’s trademarked Goggle Eyes Of Horror, and today’s double-whammy is particularly intriguing to me. One expects to see them on whatever bird-man is the butt of the joke, as our stranger is here; however, the fact that the Perfesser is also sporting them seems significant. It’s as if he’s realized to his shock that Shoe is right, King is the name of his dog, but he was talking to the other man about a real king, and he forgets, sometimes, which is which. It’s the look of panic a man has in a moment of lucidity as he realizes he’s slipping into senility or going insane, and as such is a thousand times more harrowing than some mild consternation at almost ordering a sub-par meal.

Apartment 3-G, 2/16/11

Good gracious, why does Iris keep falling asleep in the car? Is she like a baby, and the sound of wheels on pavement just lulls her to sleep more or less immediately? I’ve been assuming that this is just a jaunt of a few hours or less, but perhaps I’m wrong; perhaps they’ve been driving aimlessly around Upstate New York for days, and Iris has been passing out from exhaustion whenever she has a few minutes. Trey and Margo have stayed awake the whole time, since they’re high on love and/or cocaine.

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Spider-Man, 2/7/11

Whoah, big surprise in Spider-Man today! No, it’s not the fact that newspaper Spider-Man has finally decided to cash in on Twilight mania; that was more or less inevitable. Nor should we be startled by the title character’s braggadocio over his epic sleeping prowess, since we’re all well aware that the sheer magnitude of his laziness is his only distinguishing feature. No, the shocker is that J. Jonah Jameson has decided to transform the Daily Bugle into a British-style tabloid, as we can see in panel two. Unfortunately, on day one the copy desk already used the only Britishisms they knew — “cheers” and “Yanks” and were forced to just slip a placeholding “something” in as the headline’s final word, hoping to cram in some BBC watching in time for tomorrow morning’s edition.

Shoe, 2/7/11

Speaking of the mass media, I’m pretty sure that this is the first time I’ve ever seen ostensible news-bird Cosmo actually perpetrating journalism in this strip. I’m not really sure why he’s filing his story from the Roz’s diner rather than the newsroom, unless the gruesome crime scene he’s describing is actually just off panel, and the characters’ favorite lunchtime spot has become a scene of unimaginable carnage, with corpses everywhere. Gory as the thought is, the strip at least deserves kudos for actually making its bird-world setting integral to the joke, for once.

Mark Trail, 2/7/11

Barely a year after managing to keep an inarticulate interrogative to himself, Mark Trail has apparently learned how to think exclamations without saying them. Soon he’ll be able to construct a sentence complete with nouns and verbs silently, entirely within his own mind — and then there will be nothing he can’t do.

Lockhorns, 2/7/11

Loretta doesn’t want Leroy passing out like last year, so she hid all the booze! Which is frankly pretty cruel. The only thing worse than a birthday party with no guests except the wife you hate is a sober birthday party with no guests except the wife you hate.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/26/11

Oh, thank goodness, this tortuous negotiation is over. Berna will go to Rex and June’s financial advisor, “Dex,” who will be Rex wearing a fake mustache and speaking in a comical fake British accent, and who will urge her to invest her lottery winnings in the series of Cayman Islands-based shell corporations that Rex and June have set up for just this sort of eventuality. With that settled, Rex will go and deign to spend five minutes with whatever patient has been coughing his or her lungs out in the waiting room for the last hour.

Shoe, 1/26/11

Well, that’s because doing homework is an essentially boring activity to look at, and television as a medium is all about visual excitement! The comics, by contrast, seem to feature child characters doing their homework all the time. This … this could be relevant to the state of the medium.

Dennis the Menace, 1/26/11

Dennis refusing to join Margaret in a little light necromancy? Definitely non-menacing.