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Lockhorns, 9/27/13

This isn’t the first time that Loretta and Leroy have gone to see one of the Twilight films, but it’s always jarring and delightful when a smidgen of contemporary pop culture forces its way into the Lockhorns’ eternal 1962, isn’t it? I am also 100% in love with the fake Twilight poster hanging up at the Lockhorns’ local cinema. It reimagines Robert Pattinson’s dull, pasty visage as the brooding face of a proper Weimar-era expressionist vampire. And the graphic design! Doesn’t the striking image of the undead fiend’s face floating over the single word “TWILIGHT” have a million times more impact than, say, this piece of overbusy airbrushed garbage? Kudos, Lockhorns, for daring to imagine a better world than ours.

Mary Worth, 9/27/13

“The specific reason is that I have no friends and no life and writing advice to people desperate enough to send me letters is literally the only thing that gives my existence the barest shred of meaning! Uh, I guess I sort of covered that earlier, but that’s the much more specific version.”

Family Circus, 9/27/13

“I mean, he’s a competent adult and he could just learn how to cook properly, but I guess he figures that if he does, that’ll undermine the whole patriarchal structure that gives him power. So, your parents abandoned you at the world’s dullest mall kiosk too, huh?”

Shoe, 9/27/13

Huh, had it been established in this strip that the Perfesser’s mother is still alive? I guess it never hurts to introduce a new character in order to set up a hilarious joke! In this case, the joke is that an old man dropped dead during a social event for senior citizens, which probably cast a real pall over the rest of the evening.

Archie, 9/27/13

Meanwhile, the streets of Riverdale are haunted by roving packs of vicious feral dogs.

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Archie, 9/26/13

“Ha ha, yes, it can be somewhat inconvenient to read a newspaper outside, especially if there’s a breeze. But let’s be honest: Is there a way to get the day’s news, features, sports, and weather, along with fun stuff like comics, other than printed on paper? Nope! So if you like keeping up with current events, or just want to enjoy good-natured Archie Comics Publications Inc. content in bite-sized chunks, you’re going to have to subscribe to the newspaper, and that’s the way things are going to be for a long, long time.” –An Archie newspaper comic originally written some time in the late 1990s

Mark Trail, 9/26/13

“I want the senator to reconnect with the joys of killing animals one at a time! Sure, it’s not as efficient as destroying their habitat to drill for oil, but it’s much more emotionally satisfying.”

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Beetle Bailey, 9/25/13

Probably you were hoping that Spec. Gizmo’s sex robot would a be a shameful, one-off joke that would never reappear in the comics pages or on the Internet again. Well, too bad, because you don’t live in your perfect world! You live in this world of unrelenting horror, with the rest of us. Anyway, panel one reveals all sorts of unfortunate things. For instance, when Gizmo’s robot was first unveiled, nobody had bothered to drape human clothes over its square metallic chassis, yet now it appears to be wearing some kind of exaggeratedly girly dress with a crinoline skirt, further gendering the fembot and making it a slightly more acceptable target of Chip’s sexual lusts. The mere act of clothing it can be seen as akin to teaching it a shame-based code of sexual morality, much like the one Adam and Eve learned abruptly after eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The fembot’s rudimentary ethics may be limited to sexual matters, as it seems more than willing to use its inhuman strength to work violence against humans, though perhaps this is a sign that its advanced circuitry understands the concept of consent and believes that attempts to violate its structural integrity may legitimately be met with self-defense.

Anyway, I was going to do a close reading of panel two along these same lines, but then I read “He has to turn off the work switch and press the love button” and so I went and lied down for an hour instead.

Mary Worth, 9/25/13

OK, Mary Worth: I enjoy making endless jokes about Wilbur’s sandwich obsession as much as the next person who blogs about newspaper comic strips, but I like to do it on my terms. Frankly, if you’re going to include an entire panel of the sort of filthy talk that you might expect to hear when you dial 1-900-HOT-SANDWICH, I’m going to feel a little bit baited.

Herb and Jamaal, 9/25/13

I genuinely enjoy how insanely excited our nameless white-collar drone/Heart and Soul customer looks in the first couple of panels as he sets up his joke about how meetings make you doze off, ha ha, amiright people. He’s really going the extra mile here, and I appreciate it when people put effort into their sarcasm.

Phantom, 9/25/13

“Except for a period from the 1870s, when European powers began the wars of conquest referred to as the ‘Scramble for Africa,’ until the process of decolonization really took hold in the 1960s! I mean, the British, man! I couldn’t leave a skull mark on the chins of the entire British Empire, you know what I’m saying?”

Pluggers, 9/25/13

Pluggers remember a time, now thankfully in the distant past, when they had to engage in brief bouts of physical movement every half hour or so.