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Mary Worth, 11/6/13

“This award isn’t so much for me, or the other humans who work and volunteer there, as it is for the shelter itself — the actual physical building. I mean, if you think about it, all the volunteers and staffers in the world couldn’t help the homeless if we didn’t have a building to put them in, am I right? We’d just be standing around outside holding umbrellas over their heads or something, and that wouldn’t be very helpful at all! Anyway, that’s why we sometimes let the building wrench the very souls of some of our clients out of their bodies and suck them into a terrifying hell-dimension through the nightmarish maw-portal that lurks in the basement. Yes, the process is fatal and horrifying, but if this wonderful, helpful building needs to feed on the life-essence of 20 percent or so of the people we house in order to sustain its demonic existence, who are we to complain?”

Crock, 11/6/13

Wow, I sure don’t remember a hat-and-diaper-clad chinless blob-horror being among the cast of beloved legacy strip Crock. Newspapers are correct to eschew any affiliation with whatever awful demonic babble is emerging from this abomination’s perversely grinning mouth-hole.

Hi and Lois, 11/6/13

“Ha ha but what if there was a baby who was also a cougar” –an idea that should’ve immediately been discarded, but was instead turned into the punchline of a nationally syndicated comic strip

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Funky Winkerbean, 11/5/13

One of the downsides of the thick, suffocating blanket of omnipresent gloom that covers the characters in Funky Winkerbean at all times is that it’s often difficult to know how exactly how we’re supposed to be reading their facial expressions. I think “Maybe we should’ve known!” is supposed to be a light-hearted “Maybe we should’ve known that Cory would love old comic books, just like his dad, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, ha ha!” But with everyone looking so glum in that final panel, it comes across much more like “Maybe we should’ve known, oh God, we never knew our son at all, we wasted the sort time we had with him, and now he’s almost certainly going to die in some God-forsaken desert cursing our names, we’re monsters, we’re all sad, broken monsters.”

Family Circus, 11/5/13

The expression on the face of the checkout clerk here is a bit easier to parse. “Listen to how excited that little kid is about grocery bags! What a terrible bleak home life he must have, devoid of the ability to choose anything for himself, or have fun of any kind!”

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Apartment 3-G, 11/4/13

Oddball misfit Marty sure is learning some stuff about how to be a bad girl from her bad girl friend Tori! For instance, she’s learning how to make the jerk-off gesture when talking (or, in this case, thinking) about jerk-offs like her dad. She hasn’t quite gotten all the nuances down yet — for instance, you should do it sort off to the side while sneering, rather than right in front of your face while you look like you’re about to cry — but it’s nice to see her trying new things!

Slylock Fox, 11/4/13

I originally thought the solution to this puzzle was going to involve the boxer shorts that Count Weirdly hadn’t taken off yet, thanks to his last shred of human decency. But no, it’s based on the fact that your hair and nails are already dead! I’m not sure what’s more unsettling, the image of a man invisible except for his hair and nails, or the thought that we’re all covered with corpse-bits that spout out of our very flesh.

Spider-Man, 11/4/13

You’d think that Peter Parker’s own extremely non-lucrative journalism career would give him a little more sympathy for the sad souls who pissed their editors off enough to be exiled to the Spider-Man beat for their various publications. But nope, being Spider-Man means you can just be a stone-cold dick to whoever you want!

Heathcliff, 11/4/13

I love how unimpressed and aggravated Heathcliff’s owner is here. What good is it even to have a cat that uses his terrifying control over the forces of darkness to manipulate matter and cancel out gravity if you still have mice?