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Family Circus, 8/16/13

I freely admit to being charmed by the little drama in today’s Family Circus. It is a story told almost entirely in facial expressions. Dolly and Jeffy are largely uninterested in where they eat, so long as they get to eat soon; PJ doesn’t really understand what’s happening, but he can feel the anger in the air, and it makes him sad; Ma Keane is upset both about the sassback she’s getting and about the fact that once again she’s been assigned the role of the enforcer. And then there’s Big Daddy Keane and his eldest son, the axis around which today’s story revolves. Far in the background, but still deliberately made very visible to us, Daddy is practically glowing. It’s because he’s looking forward to an entire meal of adult conversation for once, of course, but it’s also because he’s getting to watch Billy get put in his place. Billy, meanwhile, is just as aware of what’s going on. He glowers back at his mother, seething at his banishment to the kitchen. Alone among the Keane Kids, he understands that the seating arrangements are based on status, and that he has fallen on the wrong side of the dividing line. Someday he’ll be at the grown-up table, he thinks, and the grown-ups will all be shut up in a nursing home somewhere, unvisited and unloved. Someday.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/16/13

Finally, after showing the main characters lounging around in their underwear and threatening to show them in a bikini and actually showing them in a bikini and having them walk in on people wearing just a towel and order people to take their shirts off — finally the strip gets to depict a naked butt. Jokes on you, prudes! That naked butt is a naked statue butt, so it’s art. Can’t argue with art!

Crankshaft, 8/16/13

Crankshaft’s viscera are still bathed in enough bodily fluids to keep them functioning, in case you were wondering.

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Mary Worth, 8/15/13

Mary’s long depressing walk in the desert with what’s-her-name where they talked about widowhood, which I found so boring that I’m not even bothering to dig up a post to link to, took for-frickin’-ever and I hated every minute of it. But this amazing “talk group”? It can go on for years as far as I’m concerned. Let’s everyone just let loose with some free-form anxiety/complaints! “My kids are out of control and I don’t know what to do!” “I’ve alienated everyone who’s every loved me!” Will Mary be so overloaded with meddling possibilities that she’ll shut down with smoke coming out of her ears, like a computer from the original Star Trek confronted with an elementary logic paradox?

Gil Thorp, 8/15/13

Oh, man, is Gil Thorp going to get in trouble for breaking kayfabe and revealing to the world that pro wrestling is staged? Not sure what the punishment for Gil Thorp the strip will be, but Gil Thorp the guy will be punished by getting into the ring with a man who’s quite physically fit but isn’t mentally all there, and who might have a hard time sticking to the script that they only half-assedly worked out.

Blondie, 8/15/13

Check out those weird circular wrinkles around the base everyone’s neck in this comic. Almost as if they’re wearing a garment the exact color of their skin? It appears that for the past eight years or so, Dagwood has continued his habit of wearing shirts made out of human flesh, and has even convinced the local youth to join his nightmarish death cult.

Family Circus, 8/15/13

If the Keane Kids are going to wander through this sterile, baffling condo complex for days and eventually starve to death, as I assume they will, it’ll be kind of appropriate that they were literally killed by suburban conformity.

Wizard of Id, 8/15/13

Here is a comic about a sexually aggressive dragon, enjoy!

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Apartment 3-G, 8/14/13

Hi everybody! I’m back from scenic Canada, and as always am appreciative for Uncle Lumpy’s fine comics-mocking skills and your pleasant behavior. Just to show you how dedicated I am to vacationing: I found out that Mark finally took Rusty fishing just like you did: on joshreads dot com, your #1 source for Mark Trail news. It was an interesting feeling and it made me think: what if I treated my relationship with the comics like the normals do, and didn’t bother to read the ones that I missed while I was away? This idea lasted roughly five seconds, because Apartment 3-G left me floundering in confusion, because wait why is Peter kissing Margo oh wait that’s Zoey what the hell did she always look exactly like Margo only with short hair? Turns out no, she used to look more like Margo’s mother Gabriella, but expecting Apartment 3-G characters to maintain stable facial configurations for more than a week or two is pretty much asking for disappointment, so whatever.

Mary Worth, 8/14/13

I also went back to see what was happening (for certain extremely limited definitions of “happening”) in Mary Worth, but I kind of regret that now. Wouldn’t it have been better to take in today’s strip without any buttressing narrative structure and just appreciate it for what it is: a guy with a mustache angrily complaining about his terribly disappointing life to the vaguely sympathetic members of a “talk group”?

Funky Winkerbean, 8/14/13

I actually deliberately stopped myself from going back and reading previous Funky Winkerbeans. I don’t want any context for this. I don’t even want the context supplied by the first panel. I just want the image of Harry Dinkle, smiling beatifically as he imagines a freakishly huge version of his younger head vomiting out a marching band. Where is the band coming from? What horrible non-Euclidean hell-dimension lies inside the Dinklemaw? I want this image and only this image, forever.