Post Content

Mark Trail, 1/15/14

All appears to be well that has ended well in Mark Trail! Mark’s good name has been cleared, Jared has gone back to the big house without so much as a punching, and, most importantly, endless piles of flapjacks and maple syrup await heroes and victims alike. A victory without flapjacks tastes like defeat, whereas a steaming pile of starchy flapjack goodness makes victory all the sweeter, both metaphorically and literally (because of the high sugar content in the maple syrup). “Good lord,” says Cherry, days from now, “After endless rounds of binging and purging, I think it’s finally become physically impossible for me to eat any more flapjacks.” “No,” says Mark. “We have to keep eating them. We neet to eat these flapjacks … forever.”

Momma, 1/15/14

It’s good, Momma! It’s very good that your son places you in a conceptual category so different from the one in which he places the women he has sex with that he’s unable to formulate a meaningful comparison between you and them. Now please, for the love of all that’s right, go to sleep and stop thinking about this, I beg you.

Post Content

Family Circus, 1/14/14

Even though the hairstyle/mustache combo marks this out as a probable rerun from the ’70s, I have a hard time remembering ever seeing a gentleman engaged in educating the Family Circus youth before. It does seem to undermine the Natural Gender Order, which is obviously troubling! Still, today we learn why male teachers (or, as I call them, “malechers”) may actually help reach kids in ways that more typical lady-teachers can’t: Billy feels comfortable telling this guy, man-to-man, that he isn’t really very smart.

Heathcliff, 1/14/14

Let’s ignore the horror of a clearly sapient creature begging his current owner to not callously sell him to some monstrous stranger and instead ask: since Heathcliff clearly has no problem with being this pirate’s sidekick, what’s the parrot’s problem? Perhaps the pirate’s lack of a peg-leg marks him out as a poseur upon whose shoulder no self-respecting parrot would deign to sit.

Mary Worth, 1/14/14

Ken thinks that if he just arranges enough scenarios in which Mary to falls into peril from which she can only be saved by handsome actor Ken Kensington, she’ll eventually have to submit to his advances! But will she instead come to the conclusion that New York is a dangerous death trap? “Hmm, Jeff’s never saved my life … but then again, Jeff’s never had to save my life!” You’re playing a dangerous game, Kensington!

Post Content

Crankshaft, 1/13/14

One of Crankshaft’s beloved/tiresome running gags is “Lena’s snack food is extremely poorly prepared and thus largely inedible,” but I don’t particularly remember her coffee being a punchline before. At first I thought it was the same gag, but note that Mary is taking another deep swig even after having spun into pin-eyed freakout mode in panel one. Clearly, while Lena’s brownies are dangerously unchewable, Lena’s coffee is dangerously addictive, with only a single sip of the pure stuff capable of turning you into a mindless junkie, drinking huge gulps even as your mind turns to mush.

Blondie, 1/13/14

Boy, Dagwood looks awful cheery for a guy who knows he’s going to die at five o’clock today! One can only assume that he has this attitude because he’s chosen this death; probably it will take the form of a spectacularly gory and public suicide capping off a killing spree in the office he hates so much. But as a final fuck-you to his employer, he’s going to dick around on the Internet on the company’s dime all day before he murders everybody.

Archie, 1/13/14

Mr. Weatherbee’s thousand-yard stare in panel two is the proper result of sudden, terrible knowledge: he realizes that we are well into the second generation of food’s transformation from a craft to commodity. Soon nobody left alive will remember a meal that was formed by your own hands or the hands of someone you loved. Whether or not we have any particularly fond memories of family dinners from our childhood, the marketing construct of “Just like mom used to make!” is so embedded in our brains that we’ll repeat it to each other endlessly as we scarf down machine-shaped corn byproduct extrusions dusted with MSG flavor crystals.

Apartment 3-G, 1/13/14

I’m not sure what’s sadder: that Margo doesn’t know anything about Tommie’s car situation, despite the fact that she’s her roommate and ostensibly one of her closest friends, or that Tommie thinks she can drive to England to see her fiance.

Slylock Fox, 1/13/14

Oh my God … that Footprints Jesus poster … it’s really a crime scene