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Family Circus, 10/31/08

Yes, Dolly is dressed as … exactly who you think she’s dressed as. At least Jeffy isn’t going as Obama, in blackface.

Meanwhile, it took me took some serious staring and contemplation to realize that Billy is supposed to be the popular Iron Man character, with his mask pushed up on top of his head (presumably so we’d know that he was really Billy, and not Robert Downey, Jr., come to score some dope from the Keane Kids). For the longest time I thought that he was wearing a Kangol hat, and he was supposed to be some guy in a Kangol hat who’s been splattered by red paint.

Dennis the Menace, 10/31/08

No amount of contemplation could help me suss out the meaning of Dennis’s outfit, however. Is he supposed to be the guy from V for Vendetta? Or just some dude in a mask who likes to stab people?

Spider-Man, 10/31/08

As I promised yesterday, the Spider-Man strip is simply relentless in its efforts to disappoint fans of Spider-Man, superhero comics, action, and narrative. Big Time, having managed to miss the web-slinger at point blank range despite paralyzing him with his most powerful weapon — sound — now simply bludgeons our hero with a clock.

Mary Worth, 10/31/08

Frank is quickly showing himself to be a very promising Mary Worth guest star. I look forward to him turning every compliment into something negative. “Frank, your daughter’s performance was simply tremendous!” “Yes, tremendously humiliating!” “Frank, this soup is delicious!” “Yes, deliciously repulsive!”

Apartment 3-G, 10/31/08

“Heh heh, some junkie I’ve never met gets popped, and that just makes for more action for Gary! Good thing I wore my sexiest camel-hair jacket!”

UPDATE: I’m going out of town for the weekend, so I probably won’t have a chance to post weekend comments until Monday. Till then, enjoy!

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Archie, 10/30/08

Today’s Archie reveals just how primitive the AJGLU 3000’s graphics subsystem is. Rather than portraying a pizza box as a collection of surfaces and enclosed foodstuffs that can wobble, flop open in mid-air, and splatter pepperoni, sauce, and grease everywhere to hilarious effect, it instead assumes that it is a simple, monolithic object that flies into the living room serenely, describing a perfect parabola before miraculously coming to rest in Jughead’s hands. I’d guess that whole system is based on Atari System 2 hardware, which explains the mysterious paperboy reference.

Hi and Lois, 10/30/08

I was going to go into a diatribe about how it’s silly that Ditto is regarding his lunch with wide-eyed shock in panel one seeing as it’s (a) one that he packed himself and (b) awesome, but then I caught sight of those two … brown … things in panel two. Are we supposed to assume that those are his two candy bars, both of which he carefully unwrapped and then set down on the lunch table to enjoy later? Yes, yes, let’s assume that, please.

Spider-Man, 10/30/08

You have to give the creators of the newspaper Spider-Man credit for always exploring new frontiers of total lameness on the part of their characters. In one corner, we have Big Time, a criminal mastermind so committed to his laughable clock theme that he has some sort of clock-shaped pop-gun that spits out its minute hand as ammunition and is thus presumably useless after two shots; and in the other, we have the Amazing Spider-Man, who boasts of his “spider reflexes,” which will help him dodge a projectile that hasn’t managed to cover about three feet of space in the time its taken him to thought-balloon a sentence and a half — only to have said reflexes completely disabled by a loud noise. Determining the winner in this battle will be like a philosophical conundrum: can an object with no mass be moved by an infinitely weak force?

Pluggers, 10/30/08

Pluggers know it’s cheapest just to get plastered at home, in front of the TV set.

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Gil Thorp, 10/23/08

Wow, it looks like our hero the ’Czak may be Gil Thorp’s most introspective and self-aware character in recent memory. Admittedly, given the parade of goofy, grinning morons who populate this strip, who refuse to turn their gaze inward even when they’re perpetrating grievous self-harm, this is like calling Jeff “the Gil Thorp character least afflicted with mutant-deformed-hand-itis in recent memory”; still, there’s something sad and appealing about his realization that his days as a goofy, grinning moron, getting up to vaguely homoerotic hijinks in the locker room, are numbered.

One of the things I actually unironically like about this strip are the occasional return visits from Milford alums — a couple of years ago, Vanilla Ice lookalike Von blew back into town to help dry out Marty Moon and romance high school girls — so I’m hoping that a few years down the road we get to see glimpses of Jeff sitting around the dorms at his third-tier state university, drinking heavily and listening to Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” and calling angrily in to Marty Moon’s public access TV show. He’s clearly on the road to gloom already, as not even Trisha Jones’ navel in panel one, nor her blatant kissy face in panel three, can pull him out of his pit of preemptive despair.

Dick Tracy, 10/23/08

Dick Tracy is getting slightly artsier when it comes to its gratuitous violence. Sure, it could have just shown us that hapless Genesis Corporation employee being beaten to death by a giant robot while Braces laughed maniacally, but I like the fact that we’re just shown the aftermath, and left to wonder how exactly the broken window figured into the scene of carnage that we just missed.

Blondie, 10/23/08

Here, let me translate today’s Blondie for you. “Those Dagwood Sandwich Shop franchises aren’t extracting as much money from this zombie comic brand as I might like. If those stupid Peanuts kids can sell insurance, then I don’t see why this crap can’t sell … pretty much anything anyone would pay for. USE ME, CORPORATE AMERICA! I WILL DANCE TO YOUR TUNE! I, DAGWOOD BUMSTEAD, AM YOUR WHORE!”

Spider-Man, 10/23/08

Behold, the power and majesty of … NAP MAN!!! If only there were something that could keep Peter Parker awake. You know, like the anticipation of fighting a super-powered nemesis and clearing his good name, or a television set.

Apartment 3-G, 10/23/08

…aaaaand another barely disguised sexual advance from Tommie goes completely ignored.