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Slylock Fox, 6/9/14

Do it, Max, Sly said to Max, silently, with his eyes. Do what you have to do. The irony was palpable: he was, after all, a fox, and there was a time when everyone knew that foxes had to be free, and the awful truth that they would chew through their own flesh and bone to escape a trap became a cliche. Slylock, who like all his anthropomorphic brethren had no memory of the Before Times, couldn’t appreciate the little joke, but presumably Count Weirdly could, presumably that was why he had set up this macabre little scene in the first place, why he had shackled Sly up in a room with a mouse-sized open window, left that saw out where Max could find it. In fact, the more you thought about it, the more obvous the many layers of irony Weirdly had baked into this sick little scenario became: the sudden Emergence of Earth’s animal life into sapience had nearly wiped out the human race, and forced poor holdouts like Weirdly into inaccessible fortresses, but Slylock now had too much cognitive power to free himself from a trap the way his kin could before, too much ability to understand the consequences of his own actions, to foresee the agony and the blood, to bring himself to do it. But he knew that if he remained in Weirdly’s captivity, worse would happen, much worse. So he had no choice but ask his best friend to do the unthinkable, to place the the sharp steel against his flesh and begin to … oh, wait, what? The eye hook is made of some different material? Haha, yeah, sure, that’d work too. That Count Weirdly, always forgetting some crucial detail! Ha!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/9/14

The whole underlying point of this endless Rex Morgan, M.D., Sarah plot is that Sarah is a frighteningly precocious adult-child and everyone around her is in a state of mortal terror at all times. They’re so terrified, in fact, that they never actually call her on any of her shenanigans, which is why the pushback she’s suddenly getting is completely fascinating to me. Either she’s going to shatter at the first sign of direct confrontation in her life, or this young man’s going to be a smear of gore with a few bits of blond crewcut in a manner of minutes.

Spider-Man, 6/9/14

YES, Dock Ock! It’s not enough that Spidey be shown up, he must also be MERCILESSLY HUMILIATED! More taunts, I say!

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Mary Worth, 6/2/14

Haha, well, that Mary Worth storyline ended pretty abruptly, didn’t it? One minute Tommy’s finding love and good honest hard work, both of which will sustain him as he finally enters adulthood and maturity (assuming he doesn’t develop Meat Lung from breathing in those sandwich fumes all day); then, suddenly, it’s Pool Party time, with Wilbur and Iris being all lovey-dovey in the background. (Tommy is not in attendance, of course, because he’s busy trying to get mustard stains out of the upholstery in the VIP section. THEY NEVER COME OUT, TOMMY; THEY NEVER COME OUT.)

The main theme here is obviously that Mary Worth sees life as a never-ending series of passive-aggressive contests in which she must triumph in order to maintain her self-image; this isn’t news, exactly, but it’s interesting to see it made so explicit here. “My brownish chicken blobs were a big hit last month, but this month I plan to obliterate all these earth-toned food shapes! Only Mary’s delicious chicken things can be remembered! Nothing else!” Then she spots a little kid, and plays nice while trying to figure who she belongs to and what horrors that person will suffer for violating the condo rules that preclude any children from coming within 500 yards of, or looking directly at, the Charterstone compound.

Slylock Fox, 6/2/14

Wow, Slylock sure is smug about his plan to keep him and Max alive by building a rudimentary desalination plant! Yep, they’ll have fresh, potable water indefinitely, if by “indefinitely” you mean “a couple weeks, tops,” since the process involves boiling water and the only fuel available is a single smallish palm tree and a boat that Max has already begun to cannibalize. Sure, boiling that octopus alive, using a giant spoon to occasionally push its writhing tentacles back into the pot, seemed like a fun way to pass the time, back when Max thought they could just drink as much ocean water as they wanted. Hindsight is 20-20, you know?

Heathcliff, 6/2/14

Heathcliff’s vibe can best be described as “surreal whimsy”; the thing is, if you ratchet back how aggressive you are about it, that also describes the New Yorker cartoon sweet spot. This one hits pretty close to that mark, honestly.

Marvin, 6/2/14

You know, I spend a lot of time making fun of all the poop jokes in Marvin, but that’s not all the strip is about! For instance, there are also jokes about how Marvin doesn’t like his father very much.

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 5/25/14

Let’s ignore, for the moment, that Count Weirdly has developed a functional, practical, and presumably quite marketable virtual reality device and is only using it to irritate Sly and Max. I think that the form he’s chosen for his holo-annoyance is quite revealing. Forget about random geographic inaccuracies; it’s more important that Slylock and Max have been thrust back to a world of pre-sapient animals, one where humans like Count Weirdly are still the dominant species. It would be as if we were suddenly confronted by specimens of Australopithecus africanus, Homo erectus, and Homo neanderthalensis: we would be far too unsettled at an encounter with our primitive ancestors, very much like us but at the same time separated by a vast intellectual gulf, to really spend much time griping that the native habitats of these various species were separated by thousands of miles and millions of years.

Perhaps Weirdly’s choice of holo-program reveals why his incredible invention has remained in his castle lab. If ultimately he can only imagine the animal species who dominate the outside world in terms of the primitive forms from his own childhood, then surely the idea of selling advanced technology to them must fill him with horror and contempt.

Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/25/14

Speaking of primitive societies, Snuffy Smith is here to remind us that notions of romantic love are a luxury available only to the global elite. In most times and places, simple economic calculations are the primary factors in choosing a mate.

Panels from Beetle Bailey, 5/25/14

On Memorial Day weekend, the soldiers of Beetle Bailey finally achieve a tragic degree of self-awareness — just enough to understand their predicament as characters in an absurdist comic strip, but not enough to do anything about it.