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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.

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Herb and Jamaal, 5/21/14

Or you could blame the way that, over the last 75 years or so and without anyone exactly intending it to happen, a set of institutions that had for centuries existed mainly as intellectual finishing schools and networking opportunities for the elite were transformed into producers of the credentials necessary for just about anyone to enter the modern economy, despite the lack of a fundamental transformation of how they work, with any number of unintended negative consequences (out-of-control student debt being at the top of the list). But, sure, use this as an opportunity to work out your frustrations about your dad, whatever.

Apartment 3-G, 5/21/14

It looks like one of Jack’s ex-thralls has wandered back onto the compound to make fun of his current victim! I also really hope Carol is kidding, though; they’ve been talking for at least five minutes, so clearly she should’ve figured out by now that Tommie’s incapable of feeling “love” or indeed any other emotion stronger than mild distress.

Slylock Fox, 5/21/14

5) Do whales engage in forbidden, perverted encounters with fish, despite the fact that cetaceans and fish are from completely different taxonomic classes with radically different reproductive cycles, and their superficial physical similarities are entirely the result of convergent evolution? Absolutely true!

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Funky Winkerbean, 5/12/14

A true artist can take a hacky, overdone concept and still manage to bend it to the service of their larger project. In the case of Funky Winkerbean, that hacky concept is “ha ha, exercise sure is difficult if you’re old and out of shape,” and that project, to which the strip is totally committed, is injecting a dose of soul-wrenching ennui into the funny pages each and every day of the week. What could’ve been just another joke about a guy whose medically mandated time on the treadmill takes longer than he’d like becomes a metaphor for life as an unwinnable race, run in sweaty silence and solitude, increasingly exhausting and yet not moving you forward a single inch. You guys are looking at the work of a master here, and I hope you appreciate it.

Slylock Fox, 5/12/14

Call me a speciesist if you must, but I usually have a hard time summoning up anything but sympathy for Slick Smitty as he occasionally violates the laws of an animal-run polity he neither understands nor respects. Here he is, with his hands terribly injured — probably he made an ill-advised attempt at offering a human-style handshake greeting to some sapient beast with sharp, unretractable claws on its forepaws — and he’s been put up in what’s essentially, let’s face it, a veterinary hospital. So sure, he wandered up the corridors, no doubt reeking of animal urine, found a basket of apples, and, yeah, he took one or two, carefully cradling them in his bandaged hands so as not to exacerbate the pain in his lacerated palms. There was some goat nearby, bleating, but, whatever, there were lots of apples in that basket. There were more apples where those came from. Do you know who first cultivated apples? Do you know who saw a tiny, sour wild fruit, growing on trees on the slopes of a Central Asian mountain range, and realized that, with patience and generations of selective breeding, eventually you’d have something juicy and succulent and sweet, growing on acre after acre of carefully tended trees? It sure wasn’t fucking goats, I’ll tell you that much.

Hagar the Horrible, 5/12/14

“Battle fatigue” is an archaic term for the collective symptoms and psychological reactions to the horrors of combat that we now refer to as a variety of post-traumatic stress disorder. So, even though Hagar spends his days burning and looting villages and murdering and enslaving the innocent, know that he wakes up every night covered in sweat and has intrusive, debilitating thoughts about the awful violence he’s seen. Centuries before the advent of the mental health profession, his only recourse is to drown his sorrows with alcohol and share his feelings with another man whose chosen profession involves endless, endless gore and horror.

Apartment 3-G, 5/12/14

We’ve been having fun for weeks now making fun of the pink Ann Taylor Loft turtleneck sweater that Tommie’s been wearing nonstop ever since she got to Jack’s large animal vet practice/cult compound, but I think this is the first time we’ve seen that she’s also been wearing white pants? This is basically the perfect outfit in which to shovel horse poop all day.

Luann, 5/12/14

In more proof that Luann seems determined to actually change things up and send its cast to college next year, it seems that beloved Pitts English teacher Mr. Fogarty will be retiring! Would you like to enjoy some more hilarious Fogarty Flashbacks™? Well, you’re going to have to check them out on the Web at LuannComic dot com, because they’re just too hot for newspapers.

Dennis the Menace, 5/12/14

It’s too bad Dennis’s spaceship doesn’t have room for a kitchen, because probably he’s going to starve to death on about day six of his mission.