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Gosh darn it, those Sunday strips are so big! With my feeble attention span, I could only focus on these small bits of them:

Panel from Mark Trail, 6/8/08

Hmm, there were 50,000 grizzlies in North America, but now there are about 1,200 … plus another 30,000 in Alaska? Apparently the Russians, not satisfied with merely reversing the political consequences of the Alaska Purchase, are secretly in the midst of building a canal down the Alaska-Canada border and using the resulting dirt to fill in the Bering Strait, thus making the grizzy-rich Seward’s Icebox a part of Asia! Mark Trail’s gonna have to punch a lot of Russkies to stop this.

Panels from Shoe, 6/8/08

The philosophical implications of Roz’s first statement here — “I hate time” — sort of boggle my mind. Does she hate time as an abstract concept? Does she wish that everything happened at once? Is she actually opposed to entropy, which scientists call “time’s arrow”? These intellectual musings serve to distract you from her statement in the second panel, which, given that Shoe takes place in an all-bird milieu, we must take quite literally: Roz has horribly mutilated one of her fellow avians and is wearing its feet as some kind of grisly trophy. Her “somewhere” implies that she doesn’t even know the whereabouts of her hapless victim, implying that she committed her ghastly crime in a fugue state — so perhaps it’s “lost time” that she really has a beef with.

Panel from Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/8/08

Speaking of philosophical dilemmas, Rex is about to find out just how hard it is prove a negative. “See, here’s my ID, which says, ‘Rex Morgan, M.D., a doctor, and totally 100 percent not a cop.'”

Panel from Family Circus, 6/8/08

Ha ha! Jeffy is terrifying his little brother with some kind of horrific demon mask! Oh, it’s all fun and games until Daddy finds out he’s been poking around in the Ritual Room again.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 6/8/08

“She is convinced that Shady Shrew is the nut-grabber.” Oh, well played, sir.

UPDATE: Oops, that’s actually “nut-nabber.” Curse you, tiny type and failing eyes! I like my version better anyway.

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Hi and Lois, 5/11/08

Yes, happy mother’s day, Lois! I’m glad to see that you’re spending it crushing any ambitions your girl-children might hold of having kids and having some other identity for themselves when they grow up. After all, everyone knows that nobody could possibly be a princess, rock star, poet, or CEO while also being a mother. Why, that’s pure madness, I tell you, pure madness!

I do have to give Lois points for having rock star fantasies that involve a gig at CBGB — and since she’s probably in the 40-45 range, this is even vaguely appropriate, chronologically. The beatnik poet look, not so much. I’m also curious as to where Chip is during this celebration. Because he’s an aspiring musician himself, it may be too painful for him to hear once again how her band had to break up after she got knocked up with him by some corporate tool she met one night after a show.

Shoe, 5/11/08

HOLY CRAP THEY’RE FLYING! I complain a lot that the bird-ness of the birds in Shoe is not exploited often enough, so it’s somewhat gratifying to see Shoe and the Perfesser swooping through the sky in living color. But since all the offices and homes and restaurants we see the Shoe characters hanging out in are on tree branches, it makes the sprawly suburban landscape that they’re navigating over somewhat disconcerting. I’d like to see them walk into one of the strip malls below them and order lunch, only to be met with uncomprehending stares and/or shrieks of terror.

Another strange anomaly thrown into sharp relief in the air: the Perfesser wears clothes — a shirt and shoes, at least — while Shoe is naked as whatever kind of bird he’s supposed to be. This brings a whole new level of discomfort to his drunken advances on barflies that we’re occasionally forced to endure.

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The Phantom, 4/11/08

As was no doubt easily predictable, I lost interest in the current Phantom storyline rather quickly after all the hilarious Jungle Patrol! catchphrases petered out. (Not that you shouldn’t be stocking up on Jungle Patrol-themed merchandise, mind you.) Basically, our lady cop and waitress have been attempting to capture a notorious arms dealer in an attempt to prove their mettle to the male chauvinist pigs who run the Jungle Patrol; throughout the process, the Ghost Who Is Helpful has been surreptitiously doing much of the heavy lifting in the bad-guy-neutralization department. Some might think that this is unfair affirmative action on the Big Purple Guy’s part to try to get some ladies into his elite law-enforcement outfit, but since everyone in The Phantom other than the Phantom is generally pretty incompetent, I’m guessing that secret help from the Unknown Commander is par for the course on Jungle Patrol missions.

In today’s final panel, though, we learn that these ladies may be a little bloodthirsty even by Jungle Patrol standards. Sure, it’s reasonable for them to return fire, but it does seem like they were just waiting for the chance, doesn’t it? Usually the Phantom lets the baddies off with a little chin music and a Skull Mark™ as a reminder to stay on the straight and narrow, but our Swiss death merchant here looks like he’ll be as full of holes as his nation’s namesake cheese in short order.

Speaking of gunplay, while our lady cop has obviously been through weapons training, when did the waitress learn to fire off handgun rounds with such steely precision? I would have liked to have seen a Rocky-style montage sequence in which she learned the various deadly arts.

Shoe, 4/11/08

“That, plus the transceiver I attached to the bottom of your car in the parking lot, means that we’ll be seein’ a lot of each other! Haw haw!”

Since the earliest days of this blog, I have made it clear that I cannot abide the “sexy” lady birds in this strip. I dunno, there’s something about the combination of beaks and feathers with some distinctly, er, mammalian characteristics that just utterly squicks me out. The attention that’s been lavished on the glimpse we get of this barfly’s lower back isn’t helping me, either.

Spider-Man, 4/11/08

Hey, look, Simon Krandis keeps a fistful of wadded up bribe money in his tuxedo jacket at all times. The man would have made a swell governor!

The final panel is simultaneously the most hilarious and the most fetishistically unsettling image the Spider-Man newspaper strip has produced in the last three years.