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Mary Worth, 1/30/12

For far, far too long we Mary Worth trufans have been denied the Charterstone Pool Party that is our due. And now, it seems, we’re getting one with a vengeance. People lounging around in various hideously colored and patterned outfits? Check! A lonely Wilbur loading up a plate with earth-toned blobs of food-esque material? Check! Mary and Toby furiously gossiping about Nola Wolverson, well known local sex-hussy? You’d better believe that’s a check!

Even better than Mary and Toby sniping about what a whore Nola is (what sort of woman with a boyfriend would try to steal another woman’s husband? everyone knows that’s a single gal’s prerogative!), and indeed even better than Toby’s delusional belief that someone, anyone, might actually try to steal Ian from her, is the fact that Nola’s man-hunting actually refers back to one of the greatest plotlines in recent memory, The Erotic Adventures of Delilah. Delilah almost strayed from her marital vows before she realized that sex was gross, and so she got back together with Lawrence, culty motivational speaker husband and made a baby with him instead. Good times! Anyway, as much fun as it would be to delve back into Delilah and Lawrence’s sexual psychodrama, I hope the real direction of this next storyline involves Toby’s doubts about her own marriage, since nothing could be as delightful as the Camerons in emotional turmoil.

Slylock Fox, 1/30/12

My God, can you imagine the moral dilemmas that confront an exterminator in a world of sentient animals? And this guy’s a rat, so half the time people are probably paying him to massacre his own relatives. Presumably he found the offending bats and told them, “Look, the squirrel downstairs wants you dead, I don’t know why! Clear out as fast you can, I’ll feed her some bull about eggs or something. Just go! GO!” But no, Slylock is here to impose the iron-clad Law of the Wild: You take someone’s money to murder someone, you’d damn well better murder them.

Funky Winkerbean, 1/30/12

You’d think, with all the complaining I do about it, that I’m 100% opposed to modern-day Funky Winkerbean’s weird vibe, where the current depressing, realistic mood is slathered over a base layer of cheerful wackiness. You’d be wrong, though! I do occasionally like the strange tonal mismatch that results. For instance, our “wacky neighbor” character here (he is actually named ‘Crazy’) says something silly that in zany-world would get a laugh from the audience, but instead our redheaded waitress recoils in confusion and distaste, just as someone would in real life.

Dennis the Menace, 1/30/12

Now I know what you’re thinking: There’s literally no way to be less menacing than by helping your mom do the dishes when she asks you to, right? Oh, I don’t know, I’m guessing that the conversation before dad showed up went something like this: “Sure, mom, I’d love to help you do the dishes. It always seems like you’re doing them yourself. Why doesn’t dad ever help? Mostly he just watches TV after dinner, but how important can TV shows really be?” BAM. The seeds of discord are planted. Advantage: Dennis.

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 1/22/12

Wow, how hardcore is Slick Smitty about committing petty, pointless crimes, constantly? Hardcore enough to sneak out of his own hospital room and steal flowers and chocolates from a heavily sedated goat, for no good reason. One imagines that he had to cradle the the things in his tender and heavily bandaged hands, trying not to grunt in pain at the pressure on his still-healing flesh, all the while leaving an incriminating trail of toeprints behind him. And how do you think he burned his hands in the first place? Probably from trying to steal a hot frying pan from a duck or something. It’s a sickness, Smitty, get help!

When I first read the puzzle question, the detail my mind settled on was that Smitty claimed the flowers and candy were from his girlfriend. I half expected Slylock’s solution to be “Wrong! Slick Smitty doesn’t have a girlfriend. He only stole these gifts to fool the world — and maybe, in the process, to fool himself — into believing that someone, somewhere might love him.”

Panels from Hi and Lois, 1/22/12

Hey kids! You might have heard a lot of socialist talk about how corporate media consolidation is bad! But without it, you wouldn’t be able to enjoy seamless cross-platform entertainment experiences like these, where you can check out the adventures of your favorite licensed characters in multiple media simultaneously. (Just remember, don’t download movies illegally off the Internet, the Internet is full of child molesters and demons.)

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Beetle Bailey, 1/15/11

This is another strip where the top row of throwaway panels — so called because they’re often discarded by newspapers to cram the strip into various arrangements — completely change the tenor of the strip. Without those first two panels, we have the story that we’ve always been sold about Beetle: that he’s smugly and pathologically lazy. But with those added strips, we see that he only spends as much time as possible in bed because he’s in constant physical pain, no doubt because of some combination of forced manual labor and the beatings he receives daily from Sarge. So too his final panel fantasy becomes much more poignant: it doesn’t represent some kind of apotheosis of sloth, but rather his dream of a job that helps alleviate his all-pervading agony.

Mary Worth, 1/15/11

So Mary Worth and this waitress have basically been congratulating themselves on saving Emily since about Tuesday, and you know how sometimes something irritating in small doses can become awesome in mass? That’s pretty much how I’m starting to feel about this. I’m hoping the two of them just keep saying this stuff back and forth for another week or two. “Do you think she’ll be OK?” “Hopefully! But the real important thing is that we saved her, together, as a team! We’re amazing!”

Panel from Slylock Fox, 1/15/11

I don’t know what I like best about this: that the sentient lobster is making a desperate bid for freedom to avoid being eaten by the sentient mouse, knowing that it’s either kill or be killed, or that Slylock finds the whole thing so amusing. “Ahh! Ahh! Ahh! It’s tearing my nose apart! For the love of God, Sly, why won’t you help me?” “Heh, heh, Max, looks like you’ve bitten off more than you can chew! Should have had your food-animal killed and slaughtered before you tried to eat it, like I did!”