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Beetle Bailey, 2/14/14

Kudos to the King Features colorists: this is a joke about how Miss Buxley has placed small pieces of plastic directly onto her eyeballs (already one of the most unnatural acts I can possibly imagine) that are covered with so much filth that her normally blue irises appear to be a sort of mud-brown, and in order to sell it we really need to see those dirty specks in the middle of her wide, terrified eyes. And we do! I also like the way that Killer has suddenly stood upright in disgust between panels. “I, uh, I have to be going now. Hope you don’t go blind!”

Crock, 2/14/14

There’s an obvious horror to final panel in today’s Crock, in which a grinning camel invites us to contemplate the fact that he’s managed, through sheer force of will, to shape the fatty deposit on his back into a grotesque parody of a human heart and then urges us to enjoy “humptine’s day,” something that we might associate with the enjoyable pastime of humping a loved one if not for the profoundly unerotic vision on display. But still, for me the most awful vision here is panel two, as the hump jiggles and throbs and extends, all while this eerie sentient camel maintains unbroken eye contact with us. HAPPY HUMPTINE’S DAY EVERYBODY

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Archie, 2/13/14

Good lord, Pop’s facial expression in that last panel chills me to my very core. “That’s right, Archie, Mr. Lodge doesn’t like you,” he thinks. “None of the adults in this town like you. Your time as a teenager, during which social convention demands that we be halfway pleasant and encouraging to you, is almost over. Prepare yourself for adulthood. Prepare yourself for … the shunning.”

Judge Parker, 2/13/14

So we’ve finally met April’s mysterious dying-of-cancer dad and he’s … one of the greatest things Judge Parker has ever seen? I’m not sure if he’s based directly on Hunter S. Thompson or if he’s been filtered through Doonesbury’s Uncle Duke, but he’s fantastic and I want him in every panel from now until the heat death of the universe finally brings this storyline to a close. My only regret is that April has actually drawn attention his tarantula companion; I sort of wish that it had just sat there on his shoulder, unexplained, for the next few weeks’ worth of strips, with everyone he meets reacting to it with silent but visible disgust.

Mary Worth, 2/13/14

Yep, Tommy’s coming back to Charterstone, all right! By the expression on her face you can tell Mary is almost as excited as I am.

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Mary Worth, 2/12/14

It looks like Mary’s encounter with a sad divorced woman and her child was only a warm-up meddle; she merely anonymously paid their dinner bill and moved on. No, Wilbur is about to put her back in the professional syndicated meddler game by once again begging her to take over his Ask Wendy column/persona. You might recall that, after Wilbur had a near-death experience, he started a column about how shlubs like him survive true horrors despite all logic, and so handed his advice column off to Mary, who naturally was driven mad by the power and influence it afforded her. Less than a year later, though, Wilbur had the nerve to eat Mary’s sandwiches but then ask for the column back, to distract him from the fact that his girlfriend had dumped him to spend more time with her meth-addict ex-con son. Mary acquiesced, but now Wilbur is trying to get her to take the column over again, like she doesn’t have anything better to do, which obviously she doesn’t, but still, it’s the principle of the thing. There have been hints this week that maybe Iris is back in Wilbur’s life, along with her amazing drug-dealer son, but we’ve been teased with the prospect before, so I’m not going to hold my breath.

Hagar the Horrible, 2/12/14

By the 10th century, the Vikings had expanded their trade and plundering routes across a remarkably wide stretch of the globe, with Norse voyagers reaching Greenland in the northwest and Constantinople in the southeast. But it’s true, they traveled almost always over water, whether the open ocean in the case of the North Atlantic or the Russian river systems to reach the Black Sea. So, yes, Honi, the Mongols, landlocked deep in the Gobi, are probably not going to encounter any of your kinsmen, and thus are not included among your potential romantic partners. But what about the Finns? The Franks? The Inuit? The Celts? The Rus’? The Byzantines? The Bulgars? The Northumbrians? The Saxons? Why do we always want what we cannot have?