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Slylock Fox, 7/17/11

Oh, Slylock, it’s really getting to be kind of a compulsion with you, isn’t it? You could have just gone over to the two chatty she-beavers and asked, “Excuse me, are one of you Benny’s wife?” Or, even better, you could have just gotten your hands dirty for once and helped find the contact lens yourself. (Max is helping! For once, the dumb detective stereotype magnifying glass you guys haul around with you is useful!) But no, you’ve gotta be all “Ah! Benny, don’t tell me which of those ladies is your wife, because I can figure it out myself … with logic!” You’re impressing nobody, do you know that? You’re impressing nobody.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/17/11

You’ll notice that I’ve ignored Rex Morgan for a whole month, because it’s involved boring old people and their liver transplants rather than the sexy mom/sexy daughter drama we were promised. At last, we’re finding our way back to these two … only to discover that their family dynamic also involves a hilariously belligerent punk rocker! This is just more proof that we need to focus on this storyline and only this storyline, from here on in.

Mary Worth, 7/17/11

Please, Dr. Jeff, do you honestly expect to win Mary’s hand in marriage while standing upright? You’ll need to get down and do this in the traditional manner if you want to have a chance. Sure, Mary knows all about your crippling knee pain, but, look, do you want to marry her or not?

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Slylock Fox, 7/4/11

Maybe our neighborhood spawns unusually well-behaved and/or athletically skilled children, but I’ve never actually had to deal with this stereotypical scenario. Still, I’d like to think that if I did, I wouldn’t be so focused on figuring out which specific child damaged my property. I mean, surely if a foursome of young athletes were engaging in sporting pastimes dangerously close to breakable parts of my home, shouldn’t they all be considered more or less equally culpable for the resulting damage, rather than blame settling solely on the last person to touch the ball before it went on its rampage? In fact, the art in this strip reinforces this view, with the dog, bear, and bird all staring forward with looks of guilt-ridden anxiety. Only the rabbit, with his dull, heavy-lidded expression, seems impervious to feelings of self-blame over the incident; indeed, he may be far too stoned to realize what all the fuss is about.

Mary Worth, 7/4/11

I’m not saying that Mary Worth is a murderer; I’m just saying that, if Mary Worth were to kill one of your enemies and subtly try to let you know a week later that you were now forever in her debt, this is pretty much how that conversation would go.

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B.C., 6/13/11

You know, as much as I rail against the practice of keeping the same 30 or so comic strips in every newspaper in America, despite the deaths of their creators, I do understand why people like having them around. There’s something tremendously comforting in seeing the same characters, day after day, year after year, doing the same things. You get so accustomed to their rhythms that you pretty much stop questioning the strip’s visual conventions, even those conventions were laid down years before you started reading and you’re never quite sure where they came from in the first place.

Take the clothes that the cavemen of B.C. wear, for instance. I guess they’re supposed to be kind of a loincloth thing? At one point they involved a shoulder strap of some sort, but now they’re just a black strip around the waist area. Johnny Hart no doubt came up with the character design fairly early in the strip run and then promptly stopped thinking about it. However, now his grandson is in charge and is playing around with things, which involves forcing us to contemplate the fact that the cavemen’s dangly bit are on full display under these “suits,” which, thanks a lot, I think I’d like to go back to the unchanging nostalgia now.

Gil Thorp, 6/13/11

Ha ha, look at how angry Gil is in panel two! He may not have given a crap when sinister Hobart threatened to slash school budgets and lay off most of his co-workers, but when people start talking about his drinking problem and his inappropriate fraternization with students, well, that’s when things get ugly.

Slylock Fox, 6/13/11

This is pretty much one of the most hilariously depressing Slylock Foxes ever. “Sorry Max, your idea is flawed due to your fundamental inability to grasp basic thermodynamics. What? No, I don’t have a better idea. All these candles are going to melt and and this poor lady is going to go bankrupt! Well, we really should be going.”

Marvin, 6/13/11

While I can’t blame Marvin’s family for turning to illegal drugs to deal with the fact that they’re related to Marvin, I’d have guessed that they’d go for alcohol or other depressants, which would dull the pain if only temporarily. But Jeff clearly finds that coke or speed or something along those lines helps him cope, and who am I to judge?