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Beetle Bailey, 11/4/10

The art in Beetle Bailey isn’t really “good” per se, but sometimes the characters’ faces are quite expressive in their stylized way. Today, Sarge in particular has this look of resignation slowly sliding into soul-wearing sadness, presumably due to his terribly fraught relationship with food, and I actually find it quite poignant. “Don’t mind me, I’m just going to sit here at my desk joylessly eating these indeterminate brown disks that have been sitting in my desk drawer for four hours, cramming them down my maw as I stare off into space, dying inside. See you in a few minutes! I hate myself!”

Family Circus, 11/4/10

On the other hand, the thought of Jeffy lying on the living room floor weeping ceaselessly while his mother talks on the phone and ignores him is something I find utterly hilarious.

Spider-Man, 11/4/10

Oh my goodness, Spider-Man is engaged in super-powered combat! Or at least he was, briefly, before being disabled by a swift whack to the thigh with a largish stick. “OWWW” indeed! Our hero has previously been brought low by some dude with a club, a butler with a lead pipe, and a brick, but all of those adversaries allowed him the dignity of swiftly disabling him by attacking him from behind. Mole Man, by contrast, just walked up to him and hit him in the leg. The Amazing Spider-Man!

Apartment 3-G, 11/4/10

Jokes on you, crazy taser lady! As was mentioned in passing six years ago and never explained since, the Apartment 3-G girls own your building, so you’ve just confessed your lease violation to your landlord! Tommie’s too wimpy to do anything about it, but she’s also incapable of keeping a secret from Margo — as soon as Margo makes eye contact with her, she’ll blurt out “CAT! MRS. BLOOM HAS A CAT!” — so you’d best take Prissy to Florida with you if you don’t want to find your furniture crushed into a cube and left on the curb when you get back.

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Gil Thorp, 10/23/10

So there’s multiple boring storylines going on in this fall’s Gil Thorp, most of which revolve around golden boy/team captain/foster child Cody Exner, who is selfless and noble and may be buying drugs down at the park in the middle of the night, who knows, probably it will end up being something stupidly innocuous. But today’s strip contains one of the most subtly hilarious panels in many weeks of Gil Thorp, featuring young Cody frolicking with his real, unfit parents. Look, mom is smoking! And dad has a damn ponytail! Monsters! Presumably Child Protective Services stumbled onto this bucolic scene mere moments later and whisked young Cody away to a better life, where tobacco is forbidden and no man’s hair extends below the collar.

It’s even funnier to imagine that Cody is buying drugs down at the park and this story about his parents is an improvised ruse, because that would probably mean that the “parents” in his vision are just his dealers.

Spider-Man, 10/23/10

There were some hints at the beginning of this storyline that the Mole Man was going to drag Aunt May down to his subsurface kingdom and make her his unwilling bride, and Spider-Man would be required to preform a certain degree of superheroics to rescue her. But now it looks like the subterranean weirdo and Peter’s aged aunt are going to embark on a wholly consensual romance, which means that the drama will involve Peter whining about having to go have dinner with them despite the fact that the Mole Man creeps him out. This is frankly much more this strip’s speed.

Archie, 10/23/10

Oh, God, those aren’t the eyes of an adorable and mildly mischievous tyke; those are windows into a soul of PURE EVIL. Leroy knows that what he’s done was wrong, and that’s exactly why he’s going to do it again and again.

But where will he find his bride?

Family Circus, 10/23/10

“How many sins must I commit before the voices in my head stop, grandma? HOW MUCH EVIL MUST I DO TO MAKE THINGS RIGHT?”

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You almost certainly have noticed that King Features has washed its comics in pink today in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month! How has our favorite art form managed to acknowledge this important issue in the context of its usual light-hearted fare? Let’s take a look!

Rhymes With Orange and My Cage, 10/10/10

Rhymes With Orange is, as near as I can tell, the only strip with the guts to do an actual joke about breast cancer. My Cage at least attempts a Breast Cancer Awareness meta-joke.

Marvin and Curtis, 10/10/10

Some strips did a half-hearted job of trying to explain why they were all pinkish without acknowledging the “you or your loved ones might get terrible cancer” subtext. For instance, Marvin’s parents are apparently giving him psychoactive drugs, and Curtis is attempting to up his enjoyment of ladies’ church hats by literally viewing them through rose-colored glasses.

Apartment 3-G, 10/10/10

Mostly, though, the creators just churned the strips through a Breast Cancer Awareness Photoshop filter, shoehorned a pink ribbon in wherever it would fit, and went about their business. This sometimes had awkward results. Here, the ribbon of female solidarity silently shames Lu Ann and Margo, who are engaged in petty intragender squabbling.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/10/10

Breast Cancer Awareness Month had the bad form this year to fall smack in the middle of Rex Morgan’s attempt to raise awareness of prostate cancer. At least the pink ribbon had the good sense to not float right next to June’s word balloon in panel one, stealing its awareness-raising thunder. Still, the noble ribbon is oddly juxtaposed with the mayor’s final-panel threat to decapitate whoever is raising awareness about his own personal tumor-ridden prostate gland.

Blondie, 10/10/10

Blondie deserves kudos for not simply slathering Pepto-Bismol all over everything but rather integrating pink relatively tastefully into the color scheme of the Sunday strip.

Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft, 10/10/10

Shockingly, the Winkerverse strips are mostly pink-free, though Funky Winkerbean did pair up the boilerplate “Cartoonists Care” ribbon with a hand-drawn “Lisa’s Legacy” ribbon, as if to say “We don’t need to do this crap because we own this issue. We are aware of cancer and suffering and pain 365 days a year, to the exclusion of all else.”

Spider-Man, 10/10/10

And, of course, Spider-Man ignored the campaign completely, the better to reflect Peter Parker’s longstanding tradition of just stone cold not giving a shit.