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Spider-Man, 11/7/13

I mean … yes, he is? Everyone saw him? J. Jonah Jameson, you old rascal, I think you’ve finally found away to defeat Spider-Man: by just asking absurd counterfactual questions whenever anyone defends him. “In case you didn’t notice, there hasn’t been anyone reporting that their children have been kidnapped, so Spider-Man is innocent of your charge that he’s eaten thousands of New York City babies!” “But is he, Robbie? Is he??”

Dennis the Menace, 11/7/13

Dennis’s mounting anxiety over his future dreamscape combines with his mother’s crafty expression to make this panel one of the most chilling things I’ve seen today. We can never know exactly what she said to him during storytime tonight, but we now know that Alice wears the Mitchell family menacing crown.

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Here is a brief unpaid, unsolicited endorsement: Conor Lastowka, who writes for Rifftrax and co-curates the [Citation Needed] Tumblr with me and is generally hilarious, has, (unlike certain [Citation Needed] Tumblr co-curators who are still wrangling with book-length prose) finished a novel! It’s called Gone Whalin’ is about whaling, and time travel, and other exciting topics. You can check out the webpage or download the first three chapters or watch the book trailer or just buy it already!

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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!”