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Gil Thorp, 11/6/09

Yes, it’s “that time” over in prison, that time for something that we can’t really see that well because the ring of prisoners, eager for some kind of diversion from their banal minimum-security lives, is blocking our view. Is it a good old-fashioned prison fight with improvised weapons, or good old-fashioned situational homosexuality? Either way, Gil seems to have found out about it in mid-practice, somehow. “Say, Duncan, do you know there’s this awesome Web site that’s just all streaming video footage from prisons, all the time? And that the school’s Wi-Fi network reaches all the way out here to the practice fields? Anyway, long story short, your brother got stabbed to death with a fork.”

Luann, 11/6/09

“You know what, TJ? I’m 23 years old, I’m a firefighter, I saved Toni’s life by letting her fall on me. If I want to stand outside the bathroom door and masturbate while she poops, I’m allowed to! Whose parents own this house, anyway?”

TJ seems to have been recruited by Brad’s parents to prevent illicit Brad-Toni coupling, and he’ll need all of his abstinence-promotion skills to complete that mission.

Shoe, 11/6/09

“OK, Skyler, it’s about time we had a little talk. You’re getting older now, and you should know … that … you’re a bird. As am I. We’re all birds. I know we wear clothes and have jobs and go to school, so you probably thought that we’re people, but, no: birds. Are there bees out there that are similarly anthropomorphized? Seems unlikely to me, but in a world of freaky suit-wearing coffee-drinking bird-people, anything’s possible, right? Anyway, you might want to keep a lookout for bee-people. I was going to text this to you, but then I remembered that I don’t really have hands, so that would be difficult.”

Zits, 11/6/09

The weird naked degenitaled characters in Love Is: creepy.

Jeremy and Sara’s heads superimposed on said weird naked degenitaled bodies: creepier.

Jeremy grinning widely has he holds his camera just inches from Love Is-ified Sara’s naked upraised ass: That, my friends, is unspeakable perversion Friday.

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Zits, 7/8/09

True story: I got braces at the age of twelve, and for the first few days the experience was so painful and disorienting that I couldn’t really eat anything more solid than well-boiled pasta. This is almost certainly typical, but nobody had really warned me about it in advance, so it sort of freaked me out, and I began to worry that I’d be spending the next two years eating things that didn’t require much chewing; thus, before my mother returned from work one evening, I staged my suicide in protest. It wasn’t a particularly elaborate simulation — a florid “Good bye, cruel world that I can no longer masticate properly” note and me sprawled dramatically on the couch — and my mom’s first reaction was laughter, which means either it was wholly unconvincing or other things I don’t care to think about.

Anyway, this is my way of saying that I may be biased here, but I don’t think Dennis is telling some hilarious anecdote in panel one. The way he’s pointing at his metal-caged mouth is particularly troubling to me, and I imagine he’s actually saying “I think you made it too tight! Oh, God, the pain is unbearable!” But, accustomed to having his feelings on the matter ignored, he just slouches off with a resigned “schormz,” knowing that the discomfort will subside just in time for his next appointment, when the cycle begins again.

Family Circus, 7/8/09

Wait, a vegetarian … and all that shaggy hair … my God, have the Keanes allowed a dirty hippie into their home? The animal cracker bit may indicate that his mind has been reduced to pudding by the demon reefer, but more likely he’s just making a joke (which is also entirely unacceptable in polite company, because it confuses the children). I also suspect that if he heard Jeffy referring to him as “Mr. Coverly” he’d say “Hey, call me Jack, little guy! My dad is Mr. Coverly.” Anyway, why would our family of upstanding patriots allow this sort of person to sit in their living room and eat their generic potato chips? I suspect that he’s a new neighbor, and the clan patriarch is giving him one last chance to renounce his hateful philosophy and get a job that requires a tie; failing that, his long-haired head will be put on a spike on the Keane Kompound’s walls, as a warning to others.

Beetle Bailey, 7/8/09

I was going to make a crack about illegal use of a work-related credit card here, but on the scale of corrupt Defense Department spending, this is probably as low as it gets, even if Beetle and Miss Buxley are eating at an establishment that makes waiters wear tuxedos to serve soup. Anyway, I’m guessing she’s paying because she thinks that this way he’ll have to put out. Good luck with that, sweetie!

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Judge Parker, 2/20/09

So! Indulge me for a moment in a little Judge Parker memory-lane-travel/detective work. Longtime Judge Parker readers will recognize the name April Bower; she was a paralegal or assistant or something in Sam and Randy’s law firm, and was briefly Randy’s love interest — here they are flirting shamelessly, right before Randy teaches her how to use chopsticks in a t-shirt worthy phrase. Anyway, soon after that touching little scene, April ran off to join the CIA, because obviously the dangerous, shadowy life of a spy was preferable to being romantically involved with Randy Parker.

Anyone who dares call himself a Judge Parker commentator ought to have had all of that information at his fingertips the moment Ms. Bower dramatically reinjected herself back into this plot. And yet I spent several moments staring at panel three in puzzlement and confusion, which, I eventually realized, was because April looks an awful lot like the mean mom of Sophie’s cheerleader tormentress!

She’s even wearing a trenchcoat — just like stereotypical spies wear, HMMM? Only Abby calls this lady “Mary” and says she’s an old friend. It’s also important to note that, as those old strips I linked to illustrate, this is the first time April has appeared since Eduardo Barreto has taken over art duties for the strip. So here are the possibilities as I see them:

• Mary, knowing that nobody has seen April as drawn by the new artist, figures that she can bluff her way into the party under a false identity. Once inside, she plans to implement her revenge against the snooty Spencers by gluing Abbey to a chair and ruining her dress.
• April Bowers has been doing a deep cover operation for the CIA as “Mary,” a typical suburban mom, for years now. Her mission is to monitor one Sophie Spencer, whose known hyperintelligence and radical leftist leanings have marked her as a threat to national security.
• Barreto has a thing for Nicolette Sheridan.

In other news, the elder Judge Parker’s wife is Randy’s step-mom, and while she has expressed her motherly feelings for him before, I find it creepy that someone else would identify her as his “mom” at first sight, considering that she would have had to have given birth to him at the age of, oh, let’s say -4.

Blondie, 2/20/09

You know, considering the fact that Dagwood is Dithers’s most useless and hated employee, the two of them certainly socialize together a lot. Are there no other irascible, elderly plutocrats with Mrs. Dumont-esque wives in town with whom Dithers can get together and swap tales of robber baronage? The experience doesn’t seem to be going well for Mrs. Dithers; take a good look and you’ll notice that her usually zaftig figure seems to have wasted away. Presumably being confronted with the impossibly hourglass-shaped Blondie on a regular basis has prompted a nasty case of anorexia.

Mark Trail, 2/20/09

There’s a line in the first X-Files movie where Mulder is rambling on in typical fashion about shadowy forces within the federal bureaucracy, and posits that someday a major nationwide disaster would strike and that’s when power would be seized by “FEMA, the secret government.” This got the biggest laugh of the movie in the theater where I saw it, and that was years before we learned all too well how bad FEMA was at its actual job, to say nothing of its hidden ruling-the-nation-with-an-iron-fist duties. But today’s Mark Trail proves that maybe Mulder just had his obscure federal agencies wrong; apparently, it’s the sinister representatives of the Forest Service who are keeping tabs on each and every one of us, silently compiling dossiers, just waiting for the moment when that information will become useful. Want to know the dirty little secrets of any citizen, anywhere? Ask your local forest ranger!

Zits, 2/20/09

This may not be true in all regional dialects, but in my experience most Jewish people would say “at temple” rather than “at the temple” (just as most Christians would say “at church” rather than “at the church”). Maybe Sara is supposed to be Mormon, except that for all I know Mormons would say “at temple” too, plus I’m pretty sure Mormon temples are used exclusively for religious ceremonies and not as community centers for presentations like this. What I’m trying to say is, the “temple” to which she refers to is probably a ramshackle collection of trailers on the outskirts of town, the “Success Through Abstinence” lecture is all about how she needs to be saving herself for her future divine marriage to the Grand Exalted One, who was taken bodily up to the Heavenly Comet after the IRS tried to serve those papers to his compound seven years ago and who will collect his followers during the Great Return Event in 2017, and Jeremy will return home tonight with a shaved head and glassy-eyed stare.

Dick Tracy, 2/20/09

Obviously law enforcement officers have to improvise when potentially dangerous criminals arrive on the scene on short notice; but if your idea of “improvisation” involves hurling noxious chemicals directly into the perp’s eyes, then chuckling smugly as they stumble out blindly to their car, which they’ll inevitably drive into some kind of fiery wreck — well, that says a little something about you, is all I’m saying.