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B.C. and Herb and Jamaal, 9/20/13

Well, congratulations, B.C., you have done the impossible! You have created a strip that made a technology joke in Herb and Jamaal look hip and with-it by comparison. Sure, Jamaal, still adds a weird, awkward “and tons of other means” to his list of social media services in panel one; but at least that list consists entirely of real, actual websites that exist and are popular right now, on the day the strip was published. And the punchline to the joke actually reflects a reasonable observation about how social media affects our day-to-day relationships with other humans! Another way that social media affects us is of course that sometimes we find it so overwhelming that we fly into a panic and then write a cartoon in which a bunch of ants spout gibberish at one another.

Crankshaft, 9/20/13

The entire plot of Crankshaft for the past two weeks has been that there is a new bus driver who is a lady, and who is nice, and who actually cares about being good at her job and nice to her co-workers and to the children who ride her bus. Naturally, she’s viewed with suspicion and loathing by the monstrous assholes who are the ostensible protagonists of this strip. Today their long national nightmare is about to come to end, though, because Crankshaft is clearly relishing the thought of murdering her by running her over with his bus.

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Better Half, 9/19/13

Boy, those sure do sound like sophisticated cockroaches! Just scuttling all over the place, their dark red chitin gleaming in the light, their awful legs somehow capable of wielding tools now, humanity’s only advantage gone in a stroke. Three forks waving about like their antenna, and yet still they can achieve a sort of rolling, lopsided locomotion with their other three legs. The forks plunge into food, into garbage, into feces, into anything even vaguely organic, because the cockroaches can eat all of it. They can eat it even faster, now that they’ve figured out how to use forks. They’re getting bigger. They’re getting stronger. They’re biding their time, but they won’t have to bide their time for much longer.

Mark Trail, 9/19/13

“Personal interest” is supposed to imply that Johnny is on the payroll of some sinister big oil conglomerate, and this implication will turn out to be true, because storytelling in Mark Trail is 100% linear and has no room for narrative feints or misdirection of any kind. But still, Johnny’s real personal interest — his personal passion — seems to lie not so much in loving oil but in hating wildlife. Stupid, stupid wildlife. In the end, he doesn’t care if fracking poisons the water table or if nuclear waste irradiates the forest or if strip mining just peels the entire ecosystem right off the face of the earth, as long as something kills a bunch of animals, and the more quickly the better.

Funky Winkerbean, 9/19/13

One way to write a story is to have all your characters be extremely unlikeable!

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Mary Worth, 9/18/13

Oh, man, I really fell down on the job of keeping you up with Mary’s adventures (and I use that word in the loosest possible sense) over the past few weeks, didn’t I? Well, lucky for me, I don’t even have to type up a recap, because she’s conveniently thought-ballooning one for you. Her choice of reading material does give me an opportunity to point something out that I’ve been meaning to bring to your attention, though: there is now an officially authorized Mary Worth anthology that you can buy with your money on Amazon, right now. It is called Love and Other Stories of Mary Worth and it includes three of the great Mary Worth storylines of the past decade. The first is the story of Anna, who Mary urged to pursue her old flame Brian at her high school reunion even though he was married, but it turned out he wasn’t married anymore and so they got married and had sex and then she was afraid she was barren but then she barfed and it turned out she wasn’t. Next of course is the gripping tale of Aldomania, following the tale of thwarted romance from first glimpse to fiery death. And then it concludes with the story about the figure skater and her overbearing father-coach, which I seem to remember enjoying at the time but in retrospect it seems kind of meh and I’m not going to bother fishing through my archives to find the strips, but still, you should buy this book, because why not? I actually had forgotten the title of this collection and briefly thought that, in an act of subliminal buzz-building, Mary was reading her own book. Still, we can hold out hope that Return to Love is the sequel that will follow hot on the heels of Love and Other Stories, and will include all sorts of romantical Mary Worth tales like, uh, that lady who almost had sex with Charterstone’s designated pervert but then decided to stay married to her husband instead. Stay tuned!

Spider-Man, 9/18/13

Man, do I love how indignant El Condor is over Spidey and Tarantula’s ruse! Now I know why the U.S. government keeps propping up his regime despite its well-documented history of human rights abuses: because he’s hilarious! (Also, he’s cheerfully subservient to American business interests.)

Crock, 9/18/13

Remember when everyone was freaking about E. coli in their hamburgers? I think it was the late ’90s? Also, remember when “hamburger steak” was a thing that people said and/or ate? I think it was never? I guess they mean Salisbury steak, but if so why does supposed Frenchman Crock love the Kaiser so much?