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Mary Worth, 2/9/17

Oh, hey, by the way, Iris has been dumping Zak in slow motion this whole week, and he still hasn’t realized it’s happening! I certainly hope this draws out as long as possible:

“We had some great times together, and I don’t regret any of it!”

“Neither do I!”

“I realize, though, we live very different lives…”

“We sure do! They say variety’s the spice of life!”

“It’s just … I think we maybe should see other people.”

“Ha ha! I’m seeing another person right now! He’s right behind you! Hi mister, I see you!”

Blondie, 2/9/17

Dagwood immediately effacing his identity out of self-loathing and shame over his own wholly merited reputation for workplace incompetence is probably the saddest thing I’ve ever seen him do in this strip, and I’ve seen him breakdance with joy because he didn’t have to go eat at someone else’s house.

Slylock Fox, 2/9/17

The deranged, half-starved castaway in the drawing on the left wants to eat the bird. In the drawing on the right, he wants to make love to it.

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Slylock Fox, 2/6/17

“Kooky?” That’s the adjective you choose for Count Weirdly? “Kooky?” This is a man who’s brainwashes his sapient serpent sidekick so completely that she willingly commits her unborn babies to his cause, turning them into living booby traps and condemning them to a life of crime from the moment they hatch into the world! Look at her face — she’s positive thrilled to watch her newborns kill, and possibly die, to serve Count Weirdly. So yeah, I think I’d go with “history’s greatest monster” rather than “kooky,” thanks very much.

Spider-Man, 2/6/17

“You know … people who love you, who care about whether you live or die. Emotional ties to others that complicate your decisions, especially when it comes to risking your life. It’s a real situation, you know? A real situation.”

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Six Chix, 2/1/17

I’ve always been fascinated by how cultural images become detached from their origins and eventually become just bits of iconic flotsam in our collective consciousness. Like, skeletons have been associated with death for most of human history, for obvious reasons, but then in the West we started putting a hooded cloak on our skeletal death-figure, and then we started forgetting that our skeletal death-figure had a full body beneath that cloak, as the skull-face faded out of his representation. So that’s how we get cartoons like this, where a dentist is staring into the empty void where a face should be, not seeing flesh or a skull or even the back of a hood, just an infinitely dark emptiness that goes on forever, a yawning portal into the not-life that awaits us after our demise. The dentist seems remarkably unfazed by it, to be honest! Dentists have seen some shit, man.

Pluggers, 2/1/17

There are plenty of Pluggers panels that demonstrate that pluggers feel all the sorts of anxieties the rest of us do, from the financial to the familial to the creeping existential. I have to assume, then, that at some point in this joke’s history, the line was about “plugger performance anxiety.” Get it? Because usually that phrase involves inability to get an erection, but here it’s about peeing in a cup, because pluggers gave up on sex long ago. While usually I endorse complete freedom of expression in the comics, I can’t say I regret an editorial decision that spared innocent newspaper-reading Americans everywhere from thinking about the boners that these downwardly mobile exurban beast-men may or may not have.