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Spider-Man, 10/2/13

You can tell that Spidey’s become fully part of Tarantula’s desperate guerrilla army because he’s willing to participate in ethically dubious shenanigans like this. Sure, war is hell, and fake surrenders can help you achieve tactical victories, but at what cost? Once El Condor’s soldiers stop respecting the white flag of truce for their own safety, the bloody insurgency will reach truly gruesome levels of carnage.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/2/13

Lukey looks rightfully horrified as he realizes that the time is quickly approaching for his Reaping, the day when the inhabitants of this desperately poor community decide that he’s not worth keeping alive anymore and ritually tear him to shreds so they can put his remains to whatever use they can. That tongue depressor the doctor’s using? It’s made out of human bone!

Dennis the Menace, 10/2/13

So Dennis heard a new word in school today, but instead of paying the extremely minimal amount of attention necessary to the linguistic context to try to figure out what it meant, he instead came up with an interpretation that would lay the groundwork for an awkward and vaguely sexually charged question for his mother and called it a day. Pretty menacing, all in all!

Marvin, 10/2/13

Never let it be said that Marvin isn’t innovative! It’s not just a strip about urine and feces, you see. Sometimes it’s about vomit! Copious amounts of vomit! Foul-smelling hot dog vomit, washing over people and furniture like an endless flood, like a natural disaster. Ha ha, the vomiting baby’s name was “Hurly,” you see, because of vomit!

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Mark Trail, 10/1/13

Happy U.S. government shutdown day, everybody! In keeping with his tendency to say vaguely nice things to everybody and let his underlings take all the controversial stands, Senator Mason has decided that Washington, D.C., is an extremely unpleasant place right now and that he’d much rather head off on a little vacation. As a federal employee, Dusty Rhodes is now officially furloughed, but that’s OK; instead of being forced to tell the senator about all the stuff he’s not supposed to do on federal land, he can join Mark and the gang in shooting as many animals as they want, digging for oil at random, and burning down huge swaths of forest, for kicks. Who’s gonna stop them? The government? Hahahaha!

Heathcliff, 10/1/13

I don’t want to alarm you but it appears that the Garbage Ape has started to attract notice even beyond the readership of this blog. I’m all for Heathcliff’s brand of off-putting surrealism finding a wider audience, but I think creating a Robin to the Garbage Ape’s Batman in an attempt to cash in on the character’s growing renown is too precious by half.

Momma, 10/1/13

You can tell I’ve been reading Momma for far too long because what mainly irritated me about today’s strip on first read was the weird, awkward way Francis just looks at Momma in silence for two panels and not, say, the unspeakable Oedipal horror.

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Momma, 9/30/13

To “render” a judgment just means “to pronounce, declare, or state the decision of the court in a particular case.” Which doesn’t seem like it’d be very rewarding for someone like Momma, who isn’t a lawyer and doesn’t even live in Washington, D.C., so you can understand why she looks so world-weary as she explains this in panel two. (Is that sheet of paper she’s looking at a Supreme Court verdict he’s going to have to render soon?) But since they’ve heard her rendering judgements for the Court for most of their lives, Francis and MaryLou probably just assume that she’s the one literally laying down the law on America. After all, if there’s one thing reading this strip for years has taught us about these two, it’s that they’ve very dumb.

Beetle Bailey, 9/30/13

Super excited that Beetle Bailey has decided to discard any pretense of offering gentle military-themed humor and is now all about sex with robots and the characters’ crippling alcoholism. General Halftrack’s booze problem used to be limited to weekends, but now it’s spread to pretty much any day of the week as his downward spiral into substance abuse gathers speed!

Crankshaft, 9/30/13

“It’s homicidal rage! Really, he’s a complete monster!”