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Momma, 2/23/16

Say what you will about the art in Momma, but I actually appreciate the subtle shift in Francis’s facial expression between panels today. In the first, he seems genuinely excited about his new employment — sure, he hasn’t struck it rich, but it’s a job, and as perks go, free food is nothing to complain about. Everyone needs food! In the second panel, though, you can see he’s just absorbed his mother’s snarky comment, and his face is frozen in mid-smile. He’s disappointed her again. Oh, serving hamburgers isn’t good enough for Momma, huh? It’d be better if he were selling these … flat … things … seriously, what is that pile on the table? Pancakes? Has Francis rolled up a steaming hot pancake to eat with his hands? If so, I take everything I wrote above back, he deserves all the ridicule we can throw at him.

Heathcliff, 2/23/16

If there’s one character that epitomizes Heathcliff’s shift into increasingly aggressive whimsy, it’s the Garbage Ape. He started as a riff on one of the core assumptions of the Heathcliff universe — that real cats will eat things out of the trash sometimes, so it’d be funny if the cats of Heathcliff were really obsessed with garbage and city sanitation infrastructure, and even funnier if there were some kind of benevolent trash-related magical beast — a garbage ape, say, who delivered garbage, for whatever reason. This was … fine, not particularly funny per se, but not terrible either, but then the Garbage Ape started metastasizing, dressing up like a pilgrim, and now … this, transformed into a menacing mechanical walker, simultaneously terrifying and a violation of the intellectual property rights of Lucasfilm Ltd. LLC (a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios). Why? Why did it have to be this way? How did it get to this point, where someone might think this is an image that might legitimately tickle readers’ funny bone, rather than confusing and alarming them?

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Crankshaft, 2/22/16

The phrase “bet the farm” comes from an earlier era, when agriculture was the primary economic activity and a significant portion of the population lived on small family farms. To many people of that era, a farm was a home and a job and a family legacy and a retirement fund, all wrapped up in one; to “bet the farm” meant, in essence, to gamble everything you had. Thus, Crankshaft’s malapropism is for once appropriate. Crankshaft definitely needs access to a pharmacy to live! He’s very old and not particularly healthy.

Mark Trail, 2/22/16

“…I’m only teasing! Definitely do not try to get out more often. Stay here, safe in this cave, for the rest of time! You’ll see how boring my life is as the three of us gradually slip into isolation-induced delirium, here in this kingdom of eternal darkness!”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/22/16

Ya can always count on yore fambly … t’just straight up beat the shit out of you! Punch you right in the God-damned face! I know it’s Monday and everything, but this strip is particularly grim.

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Dennis the Menace, 2/21/16

I can imagine nothing more menacing than this cartoon. Children cynically acting out the most shopworn tropes of gender dynamics for our amusement? Dennis hoping against hope to spend his middle age in sloth and lethargy? This ought to chill the very souls of all right-thinking people.

Spider-Man, 2/21/16

Dr. Strange is the one they’re making into a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie with Benedict Cumberbatch, right? I love that they haven’t bothered to make him look even slightly Cumberbatchish in the last panel here. I also am going to spend the rest of the day imagining Benedict Cumberbatch intoning “the wand of watoomb!” in grandiloquent Cumberbatchian style. This is code for, like, tickets to Hamilton or something, right? Those are about as magical an item as MJ could lay her hands on.