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Family Circus, 7/3/14

Man, you guys, those are some glum-looking Keane Kids right there. Just alone in that featureless room with the cat. How do we get out? is the one question that animates their minds. Not just out of the room — though they want to get out of the room, of course — but out of their heads, out of their family, out of their lives. They’ve seen the antics of cats and dogs on the computer screen, obviously, and they wonder: what about the giggling humans in the background? Do they make money, somehow? Do they live exciting, dynamic lives, lives not spent in some room with a white rug and cream walls and no art? Could Kittycat be their ticket to that life? Too bad Kittycat doesn’t share their ambition, their desperation. Kittycat likes the featureless room. Kittycat just wants to take a bath, then maybe a nap.

Spider-Man, 7/3/14

“Thanks for getting my car back, Doctor Octopus! It’s, uh, all pretty smashed up and undriveable now, but I appreciate the thought. At least that guy didn’t successfully heist it!”

Luann, 7/3/14

Hey you guys, I know I’ve been super remiss in keeping you up to date on Luann’s queasy-making erotic stylings! Anyway, today in Luann’s queasy-making erotic stylings: Gunther’s mom wants Gunther to make good on his spontaneous and instantly regretted boast that he was going to move with Rosa to Peru so she can have the house to herself, for sex. It says a lot about Luann that Quill/Gunther’s mom is the least revolting pairing the strip has offered us in years.

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2006-07 was quite the year in the soaps, guys. Mark Trail encountered a tame bear who couldn’t understand your hostility towards her, which I immortalized in t-shirt form. Later, Mark punched a man’s beard off.

In Gil Thorp, one of Gil’s student athletes accidentally cut his own leg off with a chainsaw. In the spring, a weird lonely old man wandered onto Milford High’s grounds, who helped coach the baseball team and claimed to have played in the Negro Leagues and insisted on being called by a funny nickname.

Turns out he was a fraud, and Gil knew about it but never said anything because he was doing Gil’s job for free so why rock the boat?

Also, in Judge Parker, a substitute butler from a temp agency forced some French punk rockers to strip to their underwear at gunpoint. I swear I didn’t make a single word in that sentence up.

But year three of my blog, without question, belonged to Aldo Kelrast, the man whose name was an anagram for “stalker” because he stalked Mary Worth, stalked her from the first moment he saw her.

Mary gave Aldo the cold shoulder pretty much right away, which didn’t stop him from popping up unexpectedly.

Aldo proved wholly unable to grasp the concept of consent, even when Mary used barbarous foreign tongues to express her disinterest.

Mary eventually had no choice but to arrange an intervention for Aldo, if any group of people brought together in one room to yell at someone counts as an “intervention.” Aldo reacted as most would: by going directly to a liquor store and driving over a cliff to his death. His pudgy, Captain Kangaroo-esque corpse was left in a pile of mangled steel.

This was a huge deal. People went nuts! My blog traffic was off the charts! There was coverage on CNN! There were tribute videos!

Later, Mary and her friends went to his funeral, to make sure he was really dead, and to gloat. It was awkward and fantastic. Cold justice had been meted out, and Mary was victorious. Farewell, Aldo: you didn’t deserve to die, but you shouldn’t have gone around stalking people either.

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Funky Winkerbean, 7/2/14

Oh, man, check out how terrified Les looks by the idea that even in the fictional world being weaved by Cable Movie Entertainment, Lisa might live! It’s almost as if her death was the foundation on which he built his entire artistic career and sense of self. It’s almost as if he has to kill her again every day in his mind in order to stay Les. It’s almost as if the thought of Lisa alive, standing before him, and seeing what he’s done with his life for the past decade fills him with a the darkest sort of dread.

Take comfort in our evil screenwriter’s cynicism, Les! He’s declared this ending a “happy moment of some kind of swear word (bullshit maybe? let’s say bullshit)” because he knows just as well as you that nobody lives, nobody ever lives, everybody dies.

Shoe, 7/2/14

Ha ha it’s funny because if this show were still on the air its writer-protagonist might use a contemporary publishing platform, can you even imagine how bizarre that would be

Pluggers, 7/2/14

Ha ha it’s funny because older people prefer the pop music of their own youth to contemporary pop music they are so unique and different it is extremely note- and praiseworthy