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Family Circus, 11/9/10

Maybe it’s just me, but Dolly appears to be exuding a weird and unsettling combination of anxiety and self-awareness here. It’s like she knows that she’s supposed to be churning out yet another adorable malapropism, for the seventy quadrillionth day in a row, and quite honestly she’s got some performance anxiety about it, in part because the whole scene is pretty stale to her at this point. “Uh, yeah, I want my french fries to, uh … wear ketchup? Like, it’s clothes, except it’s a condiment? Damn it, I got nothing.” Billy, meanwhile, is sitting across the table staring at her in a sort of mute disbelief at her inability to come up with anything better. “‘Wear ketchup,’ huh? Wow, Dolly, I always thought you were on top of your game. But that … that wasn’t even trying. It’s like you’ve forgotten what being a Keane Kid is all about, which is saying adorably dumb shit about anything and everything. ‘Wear ketchup.’ Honestly.”

Shoe, 11/9/10

“Also, I’m a bird, so I don’t have teeth, and I’m pretty sure I don’t actually have ‘nails’ per se! Do claws count? Does pulling at them with my beak count?”

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Marvin, 11/1/10

Here is today’s Marvin! It is about how the title character, who is the world’s worst baby, takes pride in the fact that he sits around in his own mess, and thinks that anyone who takes the effort to control their various lower sphincters until they can dispose of their bodily wastes in a sanitary fashion is a sucker. Marvin disgusts me, if you can’t tell!

Shoe, 11/1/10

And yet my immediate thought when reading today’s Shoe was “Ha ha, that momma bird is exhausted because she spent the night barfing whatever greasy food she eats at Roz’s diner into her baby’s mouth! Yet the strip would never dare mention such a thing, despite its ostensible bird-based premise.” These contrasting reactions prove that I am hard to please, and also gross.

Marmaduke, 11/1/10

OH GOD HE HAS THE POWER OF FLIGHT NOW NONE OF US ARE SAFE

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Shoe, 10/28/10

No, my friend, your eyes do not fail you! That is a genuine URL medallion floating above Shoe’s head in panel two of Shoe, directing you to treetopstattler.com! One would assume that it was intended to be understood as having been affixed to the wall of the newsroom of the Treetops Tattler, the in-Shoe-universe newspaper for which most of the main characters toil, except that I think we’re also meant to understand that the Tattler newsroom is not a room as such but rather a bunch of office furniture balanced precariously on tree limbs, and thus does not actually have walls. Maybe the URL medallion is suspended from the branches that are obscured by Shoe’s word balloon? Anyway, treettopstattler.com just redirects you to the main Shoe site, which, in addition to Shoe strips, also features some fake Treetops Tattler news items that are mildly amusing. I mainly just want to praise the strip for recognizing that this “Internet” thing exists and perhaps should be taken advantage of in some way, which is an attitude largely foreign to the newspaper comics world.

In other word, the entire Tatter staff appears to have fallen asleep and, if I’m understanding the implication of Shoe’s statement, soiled themselves.

Marvin, 10/28/10

Ha ha, the erotic bond that once linked Marvin and his mother is now broken, maybe because he now recognizes how freakishly out of proportion her head is to her body, or maybe because HE IS A BABY AND SHE IS HIS MOTHER OH MY GOD THIS IS MONSTROUS.

Apartment 3-G, 10/28/10

“We both think you’re a boring lame-o!”

I find it interesting that both Tommie and Lu Ann are supposed to have distant and uninterested parents. This explains why both of them are drawn to Margo — both because she offers the combination of vague affection and soul-scraping disdain that they have come to associate with parental love, and because her own parental situation (lying, philandering dad; histrionic ethnic stereotype mom; pill-crazed, gun-toting stepmom) reminds them that, you know, you could do a lot worse than “distant and uninterested.”