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Slylock Fox, 7/6/08

Never mind Count Weirdly’s unnecessarily complex plastic-ice-cube-based alibi for his rather pedestrian Best Buy theft. How could the callous Count have left his menagerie of beasties alone without fresh food and water during his long trip? Whatever food the fish and the vulture were left with has been reduced to mere bones, and the hairy thing in the cage appears to just be urinating all over the floor. I don’t even want to think about how long it’s been since the brain in the jar has been watered. Perhaps Weirdly’s pointless computer crime was just an elaborate, roundabout way to get Slylock and Max to come and feed his pets, or possibly be eaten by them.

I love the aging hippie in the Six Differences. Perhaps he’s taking his grandson on a tour of America’s diners, his aging psychedelic van still blaring “Freedom Rock” out of the 8-track player as they roam our nation’s byways.

For Better Or For Worse, 7/6/08

Grandma Marion is learning the sad truth about the comics afterlife: despite the fact that you no doubt remember yourself as the ravishing young bride who actually wore the dress that you’re ectoplasmically helping to mend, you instead only get to come back as aged and potato-nosed. You’re also wearing an apron, because even in the Great Beyond, you’re expected to cook.

Funky Winkerbean, 7/6/08

The muscle-flexing, mustachioed cop in the next-to-last panel seriously led me to believe that this was the set-up for some kind of gay erotica. Since it involves the cast of Funky Winkerbean, it would be part of an extremely specific genre known as “mope porn.”

Mary Worth, 7/6/08

Speaking of mope porn … wow, Dr. Jeff has sure reached some kind of horrifying nadir of self-abasement. Will every man who lusts after Mary’s sensibly clad bod have his will broken before he can be truly worthy of her love? Aldo’s rough wooing was action of a sort, and though it led to his humiliation and horrible death, at least he didn’t spend his time slouching around the house drunkenly thought-ballooning at her picture.

Panel from Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/6/08

“Clam down” is going to be my new all-purpose reaction to people who sound like crazy men. If they are actually crazy, it’ll freak the hell out of them. “CLAM DOWN, MAN! CLAM DOWN! OYSTER! CLAM CLAM! BIVALVE!”

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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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Apartment 3-G, 6/6/08

Reasons why Margo might have the Wedding March set as her phone’s ringtone:

• She’s read the The Secret and now believes she can make a marriage proposal happen by sheer force of will; thus, she surrounds herself with wedding-related media at all times.
• That ringtone indicates a phone call from her hapless assistant Sam, who’s been left in charge of her now largely forgotten wedding planning business. He’s probably calling for help about yet another peacock-related disaster.
• That ringtone’s been assigned to Eric, about whom Margo finally stopped caring about five minutes ago. He’s using his satellite phone to make his one phone call from the police station allowed by Chinese law before he has his organs harvested, but Margo’s decided to fall for Jack’s brushcut charms instead.

(By the way, that strip with Sam in it that I linked to above is more than a year old, and Margo is already boasting about her imminent engagement! So sad, so sad.)

Mary Worth, 6/6/08

“That’s right, Mary! Now that my mother’s literal dead weight is no longer holding me back, I’m someone of stature and consequence in this town! That woman in the hideously patterned shirt … that intellectual snob, out reading in public … why, I could have either of them thrown in jail, their lives destroyed, as easy I can clench my right fist, like so! I’ll be ordering you the house Chianti at La Rosa, but I won’t be drinking any; I’m already drunk with power!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/6/08

“No way, man! You’ll pry my filthy, soiled wrestling mats from my cold, dead, MRSA-infected hands!”

Slylock Fox, 6/6/08

Cowboy one is out of his mind on mescaline; cowboy three is taking a “spirit journey” thanks to peyote; cowboys two and four are tweaking on good, old-fashioned meth.