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Family Circus, 8/19/06

As the Family Circus family’s rerun trip to Chicago wears on, I was struck by just how damn excited Billy looks here. Not only is he radiating lines of pure joy, but he’s actually drooling. Either he’s had a sudden epiphany and now realizes how global megacorporations control every aspects of our lives — from the names of our great sports stadiums to the manufacture and marketing of the cheapest of grocery items — or he really, really likes gum. Honestly, I’m betting on the latter. Dolly looks pretty thrilled by the prospect of chewing on some Doublemint too, but mom and dad just sport numb, stuporous looks. Presumably they’ve realized that all the money they’ve just spent on baseball tickets and overpriced hats and t-shirts — to say nothing of hotel and airfare — has gone to waste, because they could have entertained their kids just as much by giving them a dollar and sending them to 7-11 to get some Bubblicious.

Six Chix, 8/19/06

Oh my God, Paul needs a sex ed refresher, stat! DUDE, IT DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT.

Spider-Man, 8/19/06

Oh, wow. I for one have longed to refer to Spidey as a “costumed cretin” for some time. And to do it in an effete, slightly English accent. And to bash in the back of his head with a lead pipe. This has got to be the most satisfying Spider-Man ever.

In fact, this installment so pleased me that for a minute I failed to grasp its import. Spider-Man has singularly failed to battle a real live supervillain since April of 2005, and now we see why: he’s been easily neutralized by Narna’s totally non-super manservant. Why didn’t your spider-sense start tingling while Hugo was sneaking up on you with a bludgeon, Parker? Does it somehow magically not work on butlers? Christ.

Mary Worth, 8/19/06

Aldo’s fingers in panel two provide a good counterpoint to his dialog. I think he’s got a pretty accurate sense of the size of Mary’s black, shriveled heart.

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Spider-Man, 7/26/06

I’ve been trying very hard to ignore the slow-motion train wreck of idiocy that is this week’s Spider-Man, but I can turn away from it no longer. See, they’re filming the climactic elevator battle scene between Marvella (played by Mary Jane) and $1.99 Walgreens Plastic Halloween Cat Mask Woman (played by washed-up has-been Narna Lamarr) in a novel fashion: they’re putting them in a real elevator, with no microphones of any kind (otherwise Narna’s bitchy off-script taunts would be picked up) and having them improvise some fisticuffs. (I hear this is exactly how Robert Altman filmed most of McCabe & Mrs. Miller.) Apparently there are multiple cameras filming from multiple angles, with the fight being edited on the fly and fed directly into the VIEW SCREEN that Beardo the director and Peter Parker are watching. This is, it goes without saying, so bonecrushingly moronic that I fear that I’ve dropped five to ten IQ points just by typing this paragraph.

Note Peter’s thought balloon in panel two: he clearly has the relative inability to suspend his disbelief of a spider.

Crock, 7/26/06

So “Trooper Megan” appears to be not the butt of a one-off joke but a new addition to the lovable and poorly drawn Crock cast. To which I can only ask: why, why, why, for the love of God, why. I’ve just started reading this comic again for the first time in 15 years, and before Megan sashayed sexily onto the scene, the cast was exactly the same as it was when I graduated from high school. Is this supposed to be like Beetle Bailey, where a new “relevant” character gets added every five years or so? If so, this implies that the creators of this strip have just now discovered that women exist who don’t wear burqas. C’mon, Illegible Signature Crock-Writing Dude Whose Name It Is Not Worth My Time To Look Up: you’ve earned the right to cruise on with the same group of ham-handedly named Frenchmen that you’ve been cruising along with for decades now. Don’t make more work for yourself for no good reason — and trust me, this isn’t a good reason.

Ziggy, 7/26/06

Note to Ziggy, Inc.: The 35 Years of Ziggy Classics must amount to better than 10,000 cartoons; thus, I’m pretty sure you can get through the length of Tom II’s vacation without reprinting one that contains a totally dated current events punchline that wasn’t even funny when it was topical. I know it’s cheaper to use a robot arm to just select a comic out of the file cabinet at random rather than have someone use editorial judgement, but you might want to change that process, for quality-control purposes.

Apartment 3-G, 7/26/06

Man, look at that sad face in panel three. Because if it weren’t for totally-not-actually-happening-and-only-implied-by-a-totally-unrealistic-series-of-events-and-sitcom-style-misunderstanding action, she wouldn’t be getting any action at all.

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Pluggers, 7/19/06

With this three-pizza impulse-buy dinner, I begin to see the origin of both Rhino-Man’s rhino-like girth and his serious financial difficulties.

Apartment 3-G, 7/19/06

While you might think that this presages sitcom-style misunderstandings and complications and wackiness, Lucy knows full well, just like the rest of us, that nobody loves Tommie.

Spider-Man, 7/19/06

Hold on, there, Spidey, you forgot to take off your … no, wait, it’s going to be much funnier if he doesn’t realize.

Slylock Fox, 7/19/06

The world’s cheeriest pignappers are stealing the world’s smallest pig from the world’s jumpiest farmer.

Gasoline Alley, 7/19/06

I found this funnier than anything else in the comics today; does that make me a bad person?