Post Content

Family Circus, 7/7/08

The Family Circus has a long list of crimes that it will eventually have to answer for, but I’m hard-pressed to remember any of its offerings being as visually unappealing as today’s. Faithful reader Dean Booth has already taken things to their logical and repulsive conclusion (warning: very very very gross), so I’ll just point out that in the middle of this filth-eating mess, Jeffy appears to be concerned about his girlish figure. I was going to chalk this up to unrealistic body image propaganda coming from the media, but then I got a look at his disproportionately large ass. Dolly is kneeling, but Jeffy appears to be able to just about put his feet and his butt on the ground simultaneously. It almost looks like he’s wearing the bottom half of a fat suit, or, perhaps more realistically, like he was assembled from various mismatched parts.

(I wrote that last sentence intending to mean that this particular drawing of Jeffy might have been assembled from bits of other drawings, obviously, but I do admit that the idea of the middle Keane boy actually being an unnaturally reanimated collection of corpse parts robbed from the local morgue is deeply pleasing to me.)

Zits, 7/7/08

I like the way Connie appears to be leaning as far away from Jeremy as she can get and still stay in the frame in panel three. It’s like she’s suddenly been forced to visualize her teenage son getting “hands-on learning” from Mrs. Graworski, his biology teacher, and her skull is involuntarily attempting to flee from the source of the offending image.

Pluggers, 7/7/08

Pluggers so enjoy rubbing their carnivorous habits in the face of tree-hugging hippies that they’re willing to pretend to believe in evolution to make their point.

Post Content

Zits, 3/11/08

Today’s Zits disturbed and horrified me — not, I hasten to add, because there’s something wrong with a woman of a certain age (or any age, for that matter) dancing around in such a fashion as to cause her bosoms to jiggle and sway. No, my gripe is in how said breasts are depicted. The rightmost Connie is depicted frozen in a moment in time and leaning back, presumably as she dances to the music; in a world governed by the laws of physics as I understand them, her breasts should themselves be at the top of their gentle arc, perhaps raised up a bit from the rest of her chest. Instead, they appear to be wriggling around as she stands motionless, as if they were the tentacles around the mouth-parts of Cthulu, an illusion made all the more real by the fact that there seem to be six of them. If I saw such a thing on the front of any human female, let alone my mother, I too would beg for hysterical blindness.

Cathy, 3/11/08

Speaking of nameless horrors, there’s something unsettling about today’s Cathy, and not in the usual way, either. What exactly does Irving mean by “a person like you”? And why is Cathy standing in front of some kind of inky black portal in the final panel? “I know! That’s why I can’t go back!” she proclaims, terrified of the unspoken but no doubt awful fate that awaits her at the demonic so-called “gym”. But it doesn’t matter that she refuses to go — the darkness is looming behind her, threatening to swallow her up.

For Better Or For Worse, 3/11/08

Man, check out Liz’s face in that final panel. She looks pretty pleased with herself, doesn’t she? Remember, fellas: Nothing can bring a woman to orgasm faster than explaining carefully, with careful attention to the grammatical case of your relative pronouns, that you respect and value and her autonomy.

Meanwhile, Anthony is driving ever closer to the secluded clearing where he disposes of the bodies.

Dennis the Menace, 3/11/08

This may seem on the surface to be more run-of-the-mill submenacing, but what if by “I beat the sun up again” Dennis means not “I woke up before sunrise” but “I bested the sun in hand-to-hand combat”? You have to admit that if an eight-year-old kid managed to pummel our sun, which is 800,000 miles in diameter and has surface temperature of 9 million degrees, into submission, that would be pretty menacing — both because it would be a bad-ass achievement in and of itself and because it would send our planet’s temperature plunging close to absolute zero, killing all life on its surface. Henry and Alice will barely have time to bestir themselves before the very atmosphere freezes solid!

Herb and Jamaal, 3/11/08

I have to admit that I find the little puff of smoke hovering over the toaster in the first two panels of this strip totally adorable! It’s like the toaster is angry! Possibly because it has to just sit there and listen to this ancient, horrible joke.

Crankshaft, 3/11/08

Ha ha, the old lady slipped on the ice, probably seriously injuring herself! Man, I can’t wait to see how this barrel of laughs develops.

Post Content

Slylock Fox, 1/6/08

OH, COME ON, SLYLOCK! I can’t make out the solution to this mystery in its small typeface, but I especially can’t make out why the two of you aren’t making out right now. “Prank calls,” indeed. I’m assuming that the only way the usual slack-jawed bunny and bird townsfolk were able to figure out that these sexy, sexy phone calls were coming from Cassandra was through top-secret technology called “caller ID.” Therefore, by my powers of deduction, I come to the conclusion that she wanted to be caught — caught with a full bubble bath and a bunch of scented candles. And who do you bring over? Max. Frickin’ Max. Unbelievable. That’s it, I’m on Team Cassandra! Who’s with me? (Buy the shirt if so, obviously.)

Zits, 1/6/07

I’m not sure if I mentioned it in a blog post, but a few weeks back there was some mild degree of controversy because Zits delved into the darkest, most offensive world of sexually charged street lingo. Specifically, there was a strip that featured Jeremy uttering in the word “sucks” — not in the sense of anybody specifically sucking on anything in particular, but in the general sense of the situation he was in being suboptimal, in the way that teenagers have been doing since at least five years before I was born. Several newspapers actually pulled the strip. Anyway, it baffles me that said word caused a kerfuffle and yet Scott and Borgman walk the streets as free men after foisting this image onto our brains, is what I’m saying.

Apartment 3-G, 1/6/08

“…a little sad and a lot drunk. And a lot asshole, too.”

(P.S. Don’t forget that Comments of the Week now appear on Mondays! So you can go to bed now, is what I’m trying to say.)