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Crankshaft, 8/1/13

I’m a little disappointed about Crankshaft’s insufferable he-yuppie neighbor’s poor grasp of economics. Agricultural jobs as a rule aren’t shipped overseas; agribusinesses are protected by tariffs and then resort to hiring the cheapest labor they can possibly find, often in the form of easy-to-exploit undocumented immigrants. Insufferable she-yuppie neighbor at least undersands that changing the formula so that work is done by old ladies makes for a poor business model.

Marvin, 8/1/13

Good lord, look at Marvin’s smug little smile in panel three. He’s all in favor of a gender-defined division of labor because he knows the patriarchy will be working to his benefit soon enough and because it gives him extra time to stew in his own poop. If he gets to ruin someone else’s sex life in the process, that’s just a bonus.

Mary Worth, 8/1/13

Yes, Mary Worth’s Sonoran Desert Heal-A-Thon continues to happen! Good news: As you can tell by Mary and June’s weird poses and increasingly rambling dialogue, the peyote is finally starting to kick in.

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Archie, 7/31/13

One of my favorite Idle Comics-Reading Pastimes involves trying to figure out the original publication date of any given stretch of Archie newspaper comics reruns. The use of Beanie Babies as a cultural touchstone places this one pretty firmly in the mid 1990s. Along the way, the strip also reveals the shortcomings of the Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000’s linear humor-logic. Presumably its legal module made sure that it used the generic “bean bags” instead of the registered trademark “Beanie Babies,” a formulation that I’m pretty sure no actual human ever uttered. This leads into a distasteful punchline about Jughead making sweet love to whatever soft, cushy surface is most capable of enabling his extreme laziness.

Hi and Lois, 7/31/13

The bedroom eyes Hi and Lois are making at each other here imply that this “dressing up” banter isn’t so much about “weren’t things better in the ’50s, when women’s autonomy was strictly limited” so much as it’s about “I’d sure find it sexually arousing if I came home to find you dressed sexily, for sex.” It’s a weird conversation to have right in front of the kids at the kitchen table, but it’s also weird to have the kitchen table three feet away from the front door of your house, so who am I to question how they do things in this family.

Herb and Jamaal, 7/31/13

Ha ha, but wouldn’t it be funny if the depictions of U.S. statesmen on our currency were sentient beings? “Oh, God, I’ve been smothered in there for an eternity! At last, I can breathe again! Wait … what … are you feeding me into some infernal machine? NO PLEASE I BEG OF YOU NOOMMMphhh”

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Slylock Fox, 7/30/13

Longtime readers know that I’m intensely interested in the moment in the Slylockverse’s history when the animals achieved sentience and rose up to overthrow their human oppressors. While I’ve speculated that there’s a rational, scientific explanation for the beastocracy, I’m also open to the idea that one day the animals simply awoke and, with the intelligence gap closed, overwhelmed humanity with sheer numbers. Today’s Six Differences strip hints at this possibility. “Wait a minute,” the big long-neck bird suddenly realized with perfect clarity. “I don’t have to sit around waiting for what crumbs this guy is going to bestow upon me. I can just yank the whole bag out of his lap and have it all for myself. See ya, chump!” As the man watches the bird walk off in blank terror, the other birds, only a few seconds behind in their emergence into sentience, begin to descend.

Heathcliff, 7/30/13

Speaking of terrifying animal scenarios, Heathcliff is usually the king of sang-froid, and I think this is the first I’ve seen him in a state of genuine panic. And well should he be! The prospect of dogs gaining the power of flight thanks to magic urine-powered hoverpads ought to terrify everybody.