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Shoe, 6/14/11

I’m sure at some point somebody involved in creating this strip considered writing a punchline that referred to all the words in Roz’s opening dialog, but then everyone concerned realized “Oh, wait, it’s just Shoe,” tasked someone with writing a hot dog joke, and then moved on with their lives.

Spider-Man, 6/14/11

Peter Parker seriously overestimates the amount approbation he receives from New York’s citizens, who mostly just point at him and jeer.

Hagar the Horrible, 6/14/11

Hagar is making a last-ditch effort to stave off situational homosexuality.

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Shoe, 5/19/11

Nobody ever reads off a list of everything on a menu aloud, and Roz’s pencil is working diligently, so I assume that the Perfesser is actually ordering this extremely long list of food items, which in turn means that Shoe is referring to some kind of U.N. meeting on global obesity problems. Several of the dishes the Perfesser is trying to order are also based on bird-flesh, which means that it may be a U.N. meeting on a resurgence of cannibalism.

Gil Thorp, 5/19/11

I’m sad to report that the less interesting of Gil Thorp’s two current plotlines is the one that doesn’t involve school budget negotiations. Still, Coach Kaz is extorting money out of a longhair with the implicit threat of violence, so maybe things are looking up a bit. My bet is that Buzz Marco is less intimidated by Kaz’s beefy arms than he is by the horrifying tentacle-fingers that Kaz has so delicately draped across his collarbone.

Mary Worth, 5/19/11

Today’s Mary Worth narration box is for readers who don’t understand the orthographical convention by which bold italics convey emphasis. I dearly hope that Drew is literally shouting the final clauses of his sentences at Liza, in the increasingly desperate hope that she’ll acknowledge that he broke up with her.

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Momma, 3/16/11

I may joke about Marmaduke as a monstrous demon-beast, but if you want real, honest-to-goodness terror in the comics, you’ve got to focus on the mundane slice-of-life strips that years ago wandered deep into the woods of misanthropy and nihilism. Funky Winkerbean is the most famous of these, of course, but it’s also self-consciously arty about its wallowing in misery. For my money, the most depressing are strips like Momma, which presents itself as a cheerful gag-a-day strip despite the fact that it’s about a monstrous mother and the children who loathe her. Today’s strip can barely even be said to contain a joke: mostly, it’s just about how neither Momma’s daughter-in-law nor (even more depressingly) her son have ever enjoyed talking to her, not even once.

On the bright side, I’m pretty sure this is the first Momma that’s lavished quite so much attention on Tina’s breasts.

Beetle Bailey, 3/16/11

This, on the other hand, actually strikes me as a pointed bit of character-driven comedy (to the extent that the cast members of Beetle Bailey have “characters”). Ha ha, poor, sweet Miss Buxley thinks General Halftrack is sad about his obsolescence, when in fact he’s just trying to sit perfectly still and interact with as few external objects or concepts as possible! Best case scenario, he’s massively hung over, but he’s probably just taking a not-at-all-well-deserved respite from thinking about anything in particular as he eagerly awaits the sweet death that never comes.

Shoe, 3/16/11

In other news, the publication date of this particular comic didn’t turn out to be horribly ill-timed at all!