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Mark Trail, 8/13/11

Oh, that Bill Ellis! He’s been told repeatedly by Woods and Wildlife’s financially beleaguered parent corporation that subscription numbers and ad rates are falling, so for God’s sake get some material in the magazine that women won’t find actively abhorrent, but he doesn’t actually respect women or know what they want, so it always goes horribly awry. He once famously sent Kelly on an assignment to an “outdoor fashion show”; now he hasn’t even gotten to whatever insulting proposition he has for her before interrupting himself to take a phone call. “Sorry, Kelly, you’ll have to excuse me, this might be someone with a penis!”

Oh also COMICAL ETHNIC JOHNNY MALOTTE AND SEXY TROUBLESOME KELLY WELLY ARE GOING TO BE IN THE SAME STORYLINE THIS IS GOING TO BE SO AWEEEESSSSOMMMMEEEE

Apartment 3-G, 8/13/11

So I knew this woman once who briefly worked as a cop, and one of the things you get stuck doing if you are a female cop with very little seniority is pretending to be a prostitute in sting operations to arrest johns. And one thing that happens while you’re doing this is that you meet and chat with actual prostitutes, and you get some great stories to pass on to later acquaintances. For example: one woman had this regular customer who paid her well to spend half an hour in a bathtub full of ice, then come out and lie completely motionless and silent on the bed while he had sex with her, so he could indulge in his necrophilia without actually violating a dead body. This is a story that for obvious reasons has stuck with me, so while I assume that this series of “oh gosh, it’s so hot in New York, wouldn’t a cool bath be erotic” strips in A3G were written during one of this year’s several soul-crushing heatwaves, you’ll forgive me if I don’t find them sexy.

Slylock Fox, 8/13/11

Every once in a while Slylock Fox offers us a flashback glimpse of apocalyptic war in which the animals finally decided that enough was enough and seized control of the planet from the humans, creating the animal-ruled society we see in most of the strips. Today’s entry shows up one of the mopping-up actions of that genocidal conflict, and you can see that, despite the enthusiasm of the smaller creatures looking on, at least one bear has grown weary of the killing. “Ho, hum, another pair of wild hairless apes who haven’t figured out yet that we’ve mastered tool use. I guess I’ll just climb this ladder and disembowel them as they beg for their lives. Hasn’t our mission been accomplished? When will I be able to return to my mate and cubs back at my cave?”

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 8/7/11

You really need to read the solution and think about its implications to this realize how gross today’s Slylock Fox is. That suitcase is full of stolen money and mammal milk, implicating the bear lady. (I wonder what will become of her cub when she’s sent to the slammer? Will it be sent to Ursine Foster Care, i.e., left in the forest to fend for itself?) Since we now know that a bird can’t be expected to have a milk bottle in her suitcase, we’re left to figure out for ourselves just how she’s going to feed her little chick en route. Is there hidden in that unopened suitcase a bottle full of fish guts that she vomited up? Or will she just be puking a portion of her airline-provided meal directly into her child’s mouth, disgusting all of her fellow passengers?

As a side note, the criminal bear’s bottle has not been placed in a ziplock bag and put through the x-ray separately from the rest of her luggage. I sure hope that’s what triggered the search of her suitcase, because it would be depressing to me if our human universe TSA’s regulations are even more pointlessly stringent than those in the world of Slylock Fox, which is a notorious police state.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/7/11

Parson Tuttle is a notorious grifter and fraud with little or no theological training, so it’s not that surprising that he’s desperately hitting up one of his community’s elders for some pearls of spiritual wisdom that he can drop into his Sunday sermons. I do love how incredibly put out he looks when Grampy finally gets to the point. “I can’t wait for my enemies to die, that’ll take forever! And killin’ ’em all just sounds like work.”

Crankshaft, 8/7/11

I’m not sure if either Abbot and Costello or The Who have really been victimized particularly badly here, but if Crankshaft wants to start apologizing for its terrible punchlines, I’m certainly not going stand in its way.

(Also, as faithful reader David Willis points out, today’s Crankshaft probably takes place a decade before today’s Funky Winkerbean, meaning that Crankshaft is dead, maybe! Hooray!)

Panel from Crock, 8/7/11

This right here pretty much says all you need to know about Crock.

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Lockhorns, 7/25/11

I am absolutely in love with the enormous frown on the kid’s face in this panel. It’s like, he’s just gone down to the newsstand to buy the latest Superman comic (because like all of today’s youth he loves twee retro affectations). He didn’t expect to be harassed by some squat middle-aged stranger. Certainly he didn’t expect to be offered an observation so dense with emotional anguish and post-love ennui; he’s far too young to really understand it, but he feels the pain of it flowing out of Leroy and crashing over him in waves. He’s going home a changed person, and he’s going to be looking in his funnybooks for the real stories, the stories about what makes people human (hint: it’s suffering).

Slylock Fox, 7/25/11

Once again, Slylock proves that he simply can’t stop with the sleuthing after tiny clues, even when it isn’t necessary. I’ll bet he makes the poor techs down at the CSI lab work for days with him on figuring out the make of the tires that left those treads in the concrete before finally admitting that he also has access to the perp’s license plate, which they could connect to his registration and home address by spending about thirty seconds in front of the computer. I’m less interested in his sad and increasingly desperate little game than I am in the nattily attired duck standing on the corner. While everyone else in the neighborhood appears traumatized by the reign of automotive terror that just blew through the subdivision, he just stares forward with big, soulless eyes, like he’s a jarring minor character from a David Lynch film.