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Mother Goose and Grimm, 8/9/13

Pluggers: Origins

Spider-Man, 8/9/13

At last, the Tarantula has arrived! And he’s right — it’s always a comedown for Spider-Man when a real superhero shows up.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/9/13

Oh gosh: not only is Ginny being forced to wed the least-desirable feller in Hootin’ Holler, but he expects an arch-conservative marriage including wifely submission. Everyone who has ever met a Hootin’ Holler feller — or gal — finds this hilarious.

Momma, 8/9/13

Francis got promoted to “Dirt”! Those years spent toiling as “Assistant Dirt” really paid off!

Mary Worth, 8/9/13

Adding Mary Worth to your “sharing circle” is like inviting a wolf pack to your all-you-can-eat buffet.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Heathcliff, 8/2/13

People, I have been terribly remiss in not informing you about an amazing live performance that you can see if you live in or near Baltimore! It is a water ballet based on Moby Dick, and it is being put on by Fluid Movement, the wacky Baltimore performance art troupe that I am occasionally affiliated with. I’m not in the show this year, but my lovely wife is, and I’ve seen the performance and it’s fantastic. There are shows at 5 and 7 p.m. this coming Saturday and Sunday nights at Baltimore’s Patterson Park pool. Behold the amazing poster!

You can buy tickets here and find out more information here and maybe see/say hi to me because I’ll be volunteering in some capacity. I can’t believe it has taken a Heathcliff cartoon to prod me into promoting it here! For real, though, I’ve known people who have performed in peg legs and Heathcliff’s is pretty hardcore. Based on the leg we can see, it’s clearly not something hollow that he’s stuffing his leg into. Is he walking about with his leg uncomfortably strapped behind his back? Or did he actually amputate his leg, just to pull off a flawless sight gag that barely impresses our fish merchant? He might’ve. Heathcliff doesn’t do things by half measures. Heathcliff keeps it real.

Apartment 3-G, 8/2/13

Hey, remember when this Apartment 3-G plot was going to be about the psychological trauma that combat vets face when they return to civilian life, and that could’ve been timely and important but they could have also screwed it up pretty badly? Well, now it’s about brain tumors. Can’t go wrong with brain tumors, right?

Mark Trail, 8/2/13

I am of course duty-bound by my Comics Summarizer’s Oath to let you know when violence breaks out in Mark Trail, so here you go! We all know Mark traditionally wears pants that are too short, which becomes pretty obvious when he kicks someone, but instead of wearing khaki socks like usual today he’s just showing off his sexy bare ankles, the tease.

Spider-Man, 8/2/13

Ever since Spidey’s daring/cowardly escape from his plane, much of his time in Costa Verde has been taken up by him loudly remarking to nobody in particular that he doesn’t speak the local language. This will definitely make him beloved when he meets up with his allies! There’s nothing Latin American revolutionaries like more than being shouted at in English.

Wizard of Id, 8/2/13

I guess the Wizard of Id takes place in some pseudo-medieval era when even the basics of rudimentary statescraft were poorly understood, but still: ethics and accounting are not the same thing, guys!

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Spider-Man, 7/27/13

Whew, the Amazing Spider-Man has escaped from another tight situation, everybody! I sincerely hope that our sassy pilot/flight attendant/epaulette enthusiast was carefully watching Spidey make his getaway over the Costa Verdan’s shoulder, drawing out his sentence with an unnatural pause between “you” and “that,” making sure that he didn’t say Spider-Man was off the plane until his body was completely out the door. That way he won’t get in trouble when he’s dragged off to one of this thuggish dictatorship’s torture chambers! Technically, he wasn’t lying.

Hi and Lois, 7/27/13

Hi’s dead-eyed stare really takes this from “gentle suburban family antics” to “man in the grip of a debilitating addiction.” “I promise, I promise I won’t get out of the car,” he mumbles. “I just want to see the prices. Look, if we pull up to the curb, we can see the prices. Just let me look. Just let me look.”

Herb and Jamaal, 7/27/13

The absolute best thing about this extremely sad/hilarious (sadlarious?) Herb and Jamaal is that I think what we’re supposed to take from Herb’s wistful gaze at the phone is that his mortgage company hasn’t called him back either. Look, Herb, we may be out of the worst of the housing collapse, but there’s still a huge backlog of mortgages in arrears and foreclosure, so your lender doesn’t have time to attend to your emotional needs, especially if we’re only talking about one missed payment here.

Pluggers, 7/27/13

Wow, is this the most depressing Pluggers ever, more depressing than “Rhino-Man Hocks His TV?” “Pluggers will achieve the upper-middle-class status they wistfully yearn for only after they die.” Or maybe I’m misreading it. Maybe the panel is about plugger contempt for modern striving values. “Pluggers think your sad walled-off suburban development is a vast cemetery, your McMansion a 4,000-square-foot tombstone.”