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Beetle Bailey, 10/1/14

I like the looks of surprise in panel two not just on Miss Buxley, but on the faces of the two passers-by at the bottom of the panel. There’s no particular reason they should be showing sudden horror at the gaping, angry Sarge-maw, but their epiphany mirroring Miss Buxley’s fits in with the dream logic of the whole strip, and by “dream logic” I mean “Jesus Christ this is a Freudian bonanza of sublimated psychosexual squick.”

Spider-Man, 10/1/14

Last week, Spider-Man battled Doc Ock the only way he could: by not battling him at all, but letting another villain he accidentally set free from jail do the battling for him. Today, he’s getting actively annoyed at this thrilling super-powered combat getting all up in his personal space while he’s trying to just relax a little.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/1/14

“The floors are cover’d in bird shit, jes’ like our house, though!”

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Mark Trail, 9/30/14

My goodness guys, it has been a while since Mark has seen his family, but sure, why not stop by Washington, D.C., on his way home and do a little testifying about animal poaching and then hobnob with actual congressman Trey Gowdy, who’s taking valuable time away from his job of chairing the House Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi to do a little rhino-horn chat! Why are real elected humans appearing in this strip all of the sudden, instead of random fake baldheaded senators? Well, it’s possible that Trey Gowdy is desperate to woo environmentalist constituents and overcome his extremely low scores from the League of Conservation Voters, and so has paid good money to appear in this tree-hugger comic strip. But Mark’s cutting aside about getting proper funding for any conservation effort probably means that isn’t the case, since Congressman Gowdy is super not in favor of the government spending money. So I have to assume that his carefully rendered face and somewhat too blond hair are appearing here primarily because “Gowdy” is an objectively hilarious name.

Funky Winkerbean, 9/30/14

“The inevitable march towards death, I mean? Our fate approaches us, like an onrushing train?” The leaf hurtling to earth behind Les is a nice touch.

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Crock, 9/29/14

Reminder: When you see daily comics in color, those colors haven’t been selected by the artists, who generally submit their strips in black and white; instead, there’s a separate staff of colorists, paid by the syndicates, who add color for those contexts where color versions of the strip appear. I’m never afraid to mock these poor underpaid drones when their work results in weirdness or blatant historical errors, so I’m willing to give them kudos when they do the best they can with what they have to work with! Would a normally green cactus that loses its needles as part of a joke about it being “fall” in the desert turn orange, the way green leaves of deciduous trees turn orange before falling of their branches? Maybe! Does having the cactus be orange in the beginning ruin the joke? Trick question: this is Crock, and Crock jokes cannot be “ruined.”

Mary Worth, 9/29/14

It turns out that the real problem with Hanna Dingdon (side note: HAHAHA “DINGDON”) isn’t that her failing eyesight makes her a dangerous driver, it’s that her daughter just uses her as a personal babysitting services at the last minute, without any advance notice! Hanna has had it up to here with this inconsiderate treatment, and so she’s getting revenge the only way she knows how: by letting her grandson watch the most horrifying children’s programming you can imagine, starring monkey-faced rat-things bearing the logo of a literal broken heart on their chests, so that after every visit he’ll return to his mother a traumatized emotional wreck.