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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

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Mary Worth, 1/12/14

OK, maybe Mary is feeling certain … feelings for legendary Broadwayman Ken Kensington, feelings that have never been stirred by ostensible longtime semi-boyfriend Dr. Jeff. If the introductory quote from notorious erotica writer (eroticist? erotica-ist?) Anaïs Nin isn’t enough of a clue, how about the fact that Mary is thought-ballooning about him for four straight panels? Obviously she can’t bring herself to actually visualize the act of s-e-x, but the fact that her reverie begins with a display of monstrous bones seems significant.

But is there trouble ahead for our heroine? Of course! Because Ken in panel four looks … strangely familiar:

Oh my God, Ken is really notoriously corrupt 19th century New York political boss William Tweed! The most striking difference between these two images — Tweed’s baldness — explains why “Ken”’s hair is a weird, buttery yellow: because it’s a terrible, terrible Gilded Age toupee. I’m not sure by what means Boss Tweed has hurtled himself forward to the 21st century to romance our Mary — time travel? suspended animation? chrono-witchcraft? — but it’s clear that an upstanding citizen like Mary could never get mixed up with anyone who was the object of such ire from Harper’s. Their love can never be.

Spider-Man, 1/12/14

Um, JJJ, I know it’s cool to have spent your newspaper’s copy editing budget for the year on a powerful gadget that can override a TV camera’s feed with its own video stream, but probably you could’ve just talked to the network’s producers ahead of time and set all this up in advance? Also, “FaceTime” is a registered trademark of Apple, Inc., so expect a sternly worded letter from their legal department, narration box, hyphen or no.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/11/14

Usually when Snuffy Smith makes a joke about “th’ economy” they at least take a stab at putting “haw haw our community is very far outside the economic mainstream” at the center of the joke. This one mostly seems like an “old hillbillies say the darndest things when they misconstrue extremely common English-language idioms” gag which is pretty weak. It’s not helping that Lukey is shouting the punchline at us at the top of his lungs for no reason in panel two. “I said, I never heard it leave!! Get it? Get it? Eh? I’m being deliberately obtuse, for laughs?”

Zits, 1/11/14

Sorry, Connie: Jeremy and Sara’s cyber-child is all too real. Everything you’ve feared about the future is true: your son and his fellow teens are abandoning the messy process of biological reproduction, along with its ancillary behavior patters like sex, love, and pair-bonding, and are instead building a gleaming android race that will replace us. While the transition will be painful — literally, in the case of outmoded biological lifeforms that resist the Great Cleansing — our heirs will live in a better world than this one, assuming you expand your definition of “living.”