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Slylock Fox, 5/27/07

Ah, that sexy Cassandra Cat! With her skin-tight wetsuit and her … pale … pasty fur … totally different from the tawny coloring established in her previous appearances … like a three-day-old corpse … seriously, what the hell happened to her? Is this what a cat looks like after it’s spent some time in the water? It’s creeping me out.

Speaking of things that creep me out, the first iteration of the firefighter in the “how to draw” section at the lower left is missing not only his nose and mouth, but also most of his brainpan. It makes it very difficult to look at the completed drawing without imagining that big hat resting on the flat surface of his impossibly truncated head.

Back to Cassie’s grift: I do appreciate that various genres of news media are here to cover this sexy, sexy story: the big-haired dog from the local TV news, the eager beaver writing up the story for the newspaper’s morning edition, and the pelican, who’ll deliver the tale to an eager audience via half-eaten fish.

Dennis the Menace, 5/27/07

Good lord, just when I think Dennis can’t get any less menacing, he swings into action with his actively anti-menacing “stop smoking!” message. I suppose it’s possible that our young menace is being transformed into such a goody-goody that he becomes a menace through his cloying, annoying crusading, a symbol of the intrusive nanny state, though that doesn’t really match up with his traditional oeuvre of more straightforward menacing, like property destruction and nap disruption. It’s also possible that he wants to keep Mr. Wilson alive as long as possible so as to harass him further. “I’m not going to let the sweet embrace of cancer take you away from my persecution, old man!”

I’ve said it before, but there are few visual conventions in this strip that I find more unsettling than the “single bead of sweat coming down Mr. Wilson’s forehead,” a good example of which can be found in the rightmost panel of the second row. Really, the only thing it says to me is “WARNING! KILLING SPREE IMMINENT!”

Family Circus, 5/27/07

The Family Circus, on the other hand, does have a whiff of menace today. If this strip has an underlying message other than “drugs are awesome,” I’d love to hear it.

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Slylock Fox, 5/20/07

All of Slylock’s fancy brain-thinkin’ seems to have gone to waste here: it’s pretty obvious that the sadly un-alliteratively-named turtle is the only one gripped by guilt for what he’s done. Perhaps he never imagined himself embarking on a life of crime; maybe he just needed to pay his gambling debts, or score some tiny turtle smack; maybe now he’s thinking about how tough life’s going to be for a turtle in the big house, or at least wishing he was able to run away from the cops a little faster. At any rate, he’s just about the only Slylock Fox villain I’ve ever seen look remorseful; usually Shady Shrew or Slick Smitty or Count Weirdly react to being snagged by the long paw of the law with a smug, shit-eating grin, knowing that they’ll be out on the street committing more petty crimes in a pointlessly convoluted fashion soon enough.

Also, I think there may be Fourth Amendment issues involved in this police station’s “check all suspects for ear mites” policy.

I’m too lazy to figure any of the differences in the “six differences” puzzle, but I’m pretty sure the dude on the bed is dead in both versions of the cartoon. At least he appears to have died happy. The cat seems pleased about this situation, but presumably it will change its mind when there isn’t anything left of the corpse to eat.

Judge Parker, 5/20/07

This is clear illustration that more than $2.5 million in the checking account + a total lack of impulse control = big, big trouble. For a while, many have believed that Roger has misrepresented Rachel’s dementia and his right to dispose of her property; today, I’m beginning to suspect that this isn’t even Roger at all, as he’s clearly peeled off his fake mustache as he heads out the door (and somehow managed to become even more unattractively simian-looking in the process).

Crock, 5/20/07

It’s a sad day indeed when God Almighty’s awesome power of omniscience falls out of favor in the popular mind and must thus be rebranded as “heavencams.” Of course, since He created all of time and space, He really only has Himself to blame.

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Gil Thorp, 5/18/07

Gil Thorp continues to be unspeakably filthy. In panel one, Brynna “mishandles” Lisa’s “sinker,” if you know what I mean (and I think you do); as a result of that “collision,” her shoulder is sore the next day. Fortunately, she still has use of her right arm.

Hi and Lois, 5/18/07

Young Chip Flagston, sittin’ in a tree
down-load-ing porn-o-graph-y.

Mary Worth, 5/18/07

Mary loves her pithy little bits of advice, but there has to be some kind of internal house rule that a pearl of wisdom, once used, can never be repeated; that explains why, after 67 years in the meddling business, her sayings have gone from the helpful to the platitudinous to something at odds with everything we know about how time and space work. I don’t care how at peace you are with the past, people: you cannot astrally project yourself back in time and change what happened. Mary Worth is right in that white doctors shouldn’t trouble themselves with charity work in filthy foreign countries, but she’s off-base here.

Slylock Fox, 5/18/07

To me, the look on the dog’s face doesn’t say “lazy” so much as “has lost the will to live.”