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Slylock Fox, 3/19/07

Another day, another insanely dementedly wonderful Slylock Fox. While it’s usually the visuals that wow me in this strip, I have to admit that what I most love here is the phrase “transfer the brilliant mind of Slylock Fox to the soft innards of a ripe eggplant.” Not that the visuals aren’t awesome, of course: you’ve got Slylock’s usual sang-froid cracking just a little as he contemplates the purple prison that will soon entrap his very soul; you’ve got Max Mouse hiding out in what appears to be a mouse-sized coffin; you’ve got the slavering vulture, no doubt giddy in anticipation of feasting on Slylock’s empty husk; and, most poignantly, you’ve got the earlier results of the same fiendish procedure, languishing in a jar and, in what seems to me to be an insult added to injury, submerged in water.

Shoe, 3/19/07

Another sad example of the problems with working backwards from the punchline. Clearly this “joke” was thought up in advance, and the “healthcare plan” was shoehorned in later as a generic phrase that stands in for “Senator stuff.” Because honestly, while healthcare policy can cause a great deal of heated political debate, the only way his healthcare plan would actually cause havoc and pandemonium would be if it could boiled down to “free amphetamines for everybody.”

Marmaduke, 3/19/07

Ha ha! Marmaduke ate something that wasn’t edible, and now can’t pass it through his digestive tract! He’s ill and might die! Ha ha!

Normally I hate cartoons that depict animals in pain, but I might be willing to make an exception for Marmaduke.

Crankshaft, 3/19/07

Is it wrong of me want something terrible to happen to this child, whom Crankshaft is apparently throwing off of his bus onto the side of the road in the middle of nowhere? Perhaps if he gets kidnapped, just for a little while, before being found (unharmed, of course) in the trailer of some drifter on the outskirts of town, then Crankshaft will finally be seen as the monster that he is, with the ensuing media circus forcing him to leave town along with his resentful family.

Normally you get bumped off of an airplane because it’s full. By kicking this kid off of what appears to be an empty bus, Crankshaft earns extra asshole points. Not that he needs them.

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Here’s a bunch of links that I’ve been saving up to put in a metapost; there’s enough of it that I didn’t want it to get lost in the weekly Sunday COTW/ad love post (which will be coming soon enough). Anyway, for your interest and delictation:

• Barfield Loses His Lunch. Garfield seems pretty easy to spoof, but this is one of the better parodies out there. Made up (mostly) of existing Garfield panels that have been rearrangend and subtly altered. Click the arrow at the top of the screen to begin. Warning for the faint of heart and easily disgusted: Not for the faint of heart or easily disgusted, as this hilarous bit demonstrates. (Thanks to many faithful readers for pointing this out to me.)
• Scroll down on this page for an amusing Slylock Fox spoof.
• Speaking of our favorite vulpine detective, faitful reader Dean Booth has developed a ethically questionable Web application that allows you to cheat at Slylock Fox‘s Six Differences puzzle. It only works on Internet Explorer, and I’m too lazy to switch to my Windows laptop to try it out, but I assume it will allow you to amaze your friends with your six-difference-spotting prowess. It costs you nothing but your dignity.
• Finally, faithful reader yellojkt continues with his March Madness Comics Competition tradition. This year, he’s running the National Coolest Comics Character Contest, which you get to vote in! Already up are the Most Realistic Comics Teenager and Most Precocious Kid categories; coming soon are competitions for sexy ‘toons, evil anthropomorphic animals, and, of course, ambiguously gay duos.

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For Better Or For Worse, 3/17/07

Oh yeah, Gerald an’ April are gonna be at home all by themselves. And they’re going to “practicing.” And I think you and I both know what they’ll be practicing. That’s right: they’ll be practicing talking like actual fifteen-year-olds, rather than robots programmed by a sixty-year-old to say things like “make some green,” “the kiddies,” and, of course, “practice.”

Beetle Bailey, 3/17/07

For those of you who don’t know, a “magnum” is a one-and-a-half liter bottle of wine or champagne, which is twice the usual size. Thus, General Halftrack is merely proposing to drink himself into a stupor so as to at least briefly obliterate from his mind the hellish reality of the marriage he hates, and is not openly contemplating some kind of murder-suicide scenario. It’s still plenty grim, though perhaps not as off-putting as his flesh-colored mustache in panel two.

Curtis, 3/17/07

Clearly there’s some kind of off-panel donkey defecation going on in the first panel of today’s Curtis, but I have to admit that I’m disturbingly fixated on Curtis’ unfinished sentence. Why do you think they call it what? What? Is there some proverb or turn of phrase or bit of folk wisdom that involves donkey poop?

Judge Parker, 3/17/07

Wow, look at the expressions of utter panic on the faces Neddy and Abbey as they grapple with the concept of having missed their stop. If rich Americans, who are clearly the best and smartest people in the world, can’t handle the complexity of public transit, how in the world do the poor foreigners who ride it consistently make it home alive? Here’s a hint, kids: the train goes both ways along its whole route. You could just get off and get back on going back the other direction until you return to your stop, and not have to wander through whatever horrifying slumscape you’ve inevitably ended up in.

If you can’t tell, I’m growing more and more contemptuous of these two with each passing moment that they manage to further botch the relatively simple task of taking the train; thus, I am now openly rooting for the sinister punk rockers, and firmly believe that our pair of innocents abroad will deserve what they get. Fortunately, the evil punks probably don’t have anything sexually deviant planned for their victims, since, despite all evidence, they apparently believe that Neddy and Abbey are men. Yes, “Ils regardent la carte,” as Mohawk Punk puts it, means “They’re looking at the map,” but the “they” is masculine; the feminine would be “elles”. I don’t mean to imply that I’m some big expert Frenchie-talker — I was in charge of parlezing the vous when we were in a remarkably punk-rocker-free Paris a few years ago, and Mrs. C. will be happy to tell you how badly that went — but the ils/elles distinction is something you literally learn in the first week of French class.

Slylock Fox, 3/17/07

The most disturbing thing about this Slylock Fox? It’s not the fact that the cow has, in a burst of unnatural strength, managed to leap across a road; nor is it the cow’s unprovoked attack on the terrified rabbit, despite the fact that two species are not traditionally antagonistic towards each other. No, it’s the heavy-lidded, unfocused expression on the cow’s face, combined with the lolling tongue. That cow is high as a kite, and I don’t just mean literally.