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Apartment 3-G, 1/29/11

It’s fun to watch Lu Ann’s high hopes for this relationship rapidly vanish. I imagine that her big dreams for a working-class guy who just up and kissed her the second time they met involved lots of hot sex and not really talking much. Now he’s whining about how he’s finally realizing at age 30 that maybe he shouldn’t live with his parents and that he’s fallen in love with some mouldering shanty in Losertown, N.J.; he also appears to be threatening to drop the L-bomb on Lu Ann, so you can see why she’s decided to fake a heart attack in the hopes that he’ll go away.

Spider-Man, 1/29/11

The Spider-Man arc just now wrapping up has been utterly delightful in its ridiculousness, but the final panel promises something even better. Perhaps, having seen up close what true love can be, Mary Jane will realize what a loser her husband is and finally dump him. How will our superhero deal with heartbreak? Presumably he’ll spend weeks moping around the house, complaining ineffectually and watching TV and … oh, wait.

Wizard of Id, 1/29/11

I once speculated that the Wizard of Id supported legislated health-care reform, but it’s now clear that the strip is taking a much more radical and troubling approach.

Family Circus, 1/29/11

Jeffy only has to ask this two more times, and if Daddy still doesn’t answer he gets to eat him!

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Jumble, 1/19/11

Cartoonists: I understand that there are good reasons for drawing your characters with four fingers instead of five, mostly because in the limited space you have available drawing too many fingers risks having none of those fingers be really visible. But if you’re going to go down that road, you absolutely must not depict your four-fingered characters as making distinctive hand gestures that generally rely on the full complement of digits — like, say, the devil horns/rock-n-roll symbol — or else you risk giving the impression that your characters are freakish claw-handed mutants.

Wizard of Id, 1/19/11

Since I’m not a gazillion years old, I haven’t been reading the Wizard of Id since its inception, but based on its title I assume it originally focused on the Wizard, only to see the narrative drift to more interesting characters (this being the Wizard of Id, the definition of “interesting” is fairly restricted) like the King and Sir Rodney and Bung, the drunk whose name I’m ashamed to be able to summon up without much effort. Anyway, in the last few months the strip seems to be spending a bit more time with its title character, giving us some background on him and introducing him to a new generation. Unfortunately, these tales involve kidnapping and, one assumes, sexual assault.

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Spider-Man, 12/22/10

Oh, say, what’s going on in the unlikely romance between Aunt May and the Mole Man? Well, Spider-Man’s been trying to break it up, because he’s a sullen dick, but he also hasn’t been using any kind of interesting superpowers to do so, because he’s an incompetent feeb. After coming to the conclusion earlier this week that the Mole Man couldn’t be brought to justice for his New York City rampage because there’s no extradition treaty between the United States and Subterranea (no, really), Spider-Man is apparently trying this desperate gambit, apparently assuming that his aunt is old-fashioned enough to refuse to cohabitate with this freakish mutant without a marriage license and a church wedding.

Now, the legal argument here is patently spurious — as the unquestioned king of this gloomy underground realm, the Mole Man can presumably delegate the authority to solemnize marriages to whichever of his horrifying minions he chooses — but I do think Spidey’s smart to bring up the religious angle. Aunt May is, I imagine, a good churchgoer — Episcopalian, I’m guessing — whereas the Mole Man is the supreme God-emperor of a sunless cave kingdom of shuffling, sightless monsters. There are bound to be some value conflicts there, and they need to discuss that openly if their relationship is going to last.

Wizard of Id, 12/22/10

“C’mon,” they said. “Let’s do a Christmas-themed prison rape joke involving spiders,” they said. “It’ll be ‘edgy,'” they said. “It’s not like anybody reads the newspaper anymore, anyway,” they said.