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Archie, 6/14/13

One thing I keep meaning to mention in regard to whatever era of Archie reruns we’re getting right now is that they all seem to include a one-off mini-punchline in the first panel. I love them not because they’re funny (they’re never funny) but because they go completely unacknowledged by all the other characters, which I think I’m justified as interpreting as silent and withering contempt on their part. Jughead’s ill-will here is particularly well justified. “Archie, I’m in the middle of setting up an elaborate visual gag, I don’t need your wordplay.”

Apartment 3-G, 6/14/13

“I know everything. Why?” is a pretty sad statement about Margo’s omniscience. Sure, her infinitely expansive mind encompasses all the solid facts that make up our universe’s information-sum. But she’s still incapable of understanding the reasons behind the facts, requiring her to actually come out and interact with Lu Ann rather than just relaxing in bed with a bottle of gin and a vibrator.

Pluggers, 6/14/13

So this bewhiskered he-plugger is staring with cross-eyed intensity at the hot weathervixen on the evening news. Are you glad that the TV and its stand block our view of his crotch and left hand, so that you don’t have to see what’s going on down there? Or are you sad that we can’t see, because your awful, filthy mind can’t help but fill in the blanks in the most unsettling way possible? Either way, HAVE A GOOD WEEKEND, EVERYBODY

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Gasoline Alley, 6/13/13

Gasoline Alley’s current plotline involves the contemptible Slim being left to his own devices after his wife travelled to Hawaii without him, but things seem to be looking up as he heads upstairs to accidentally stumble upon his neighbor’s marijuana home-grow operation.

Heathcliff, 6/13/13

Moreover, where does he get the sycophants who laugh uproariously as he savagely beats the uncannily accurate depiction of his owner dangling lifelessly from a limb chosen for its maximum visibility from the house?

Mary Worth, 6/13/13

Pretty sure that even at this moment of sudden and terrible self-knowledge Elinor doesn’t consider herself a “creature,” Narration Box. This sort of needless editorializing is why so many of us don’t trust the mainstream media anymore.

Gil Thorp, 6/13/13

“You OK, Jimmy?”

“Of course I’m not OK, coach! There’s some monstrously huge hand-thing crawling up my chest! Augh, now it’s reaching for my neck! Get it off me, for the love of God, get it off me!”

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Apartment 3-G, 6/12/13

There are so many things I [love/am horrified by] (this is a single emotion that I trust is familiar to anyone reading this blog) about today’s Apartment 3-G that I can hardly stand it. Let’s start with the idea that Lu Ann lacks the rudimentary linguistic-cultural competencies necessary to parse the concept of a “famous stylist,” which would be pretty embarrassing even if she hadn’t fairly recently been on a reality TV show in the course of which she got a makeover from a famous stylist. Then add in the fact that what had on Monday been an ignorable peach-orange shirt has today suddenly become a peach-orange shirt insanely paired with an all white suit jacket, which, when combined with Lu Ann’s weirdly rubbery-seeming fish-lipped visage, makes her look like a villain from the Adam West Batman. Look, the governor is affectionally patting her mask-face! Haha, this is a [nightmare/delight].

Funky Winkerbean, 6/12/13

Man, Funky Winkerbean is really going there, if by “there” we mean “dragging one of the sad sack characters from Crankshaft ten years through a time-wormhole into the Funkypresent.” Things we’ve learned today: Jeff looks even more beaten down by life and depressed than he does in the Crankpresent; and, Crankshaft still lives, but has been banished to a nursing home, and thus presumably no longer endangers children by driving a bus. What about Jeff’s terrible mother? Has she finally shaken off this mortal coil? I’m legitimately on tenterhooks!

Crankshaft, 6/12/13

Meanwhile, back in the Crankpresent, my shriveled black heart twitched in delight at Crankshaft’s look of genuine panic in the second panel. Is this the moment when the school district decides to let him go from the job that lets him preserve a modicum of independence and dignity? Let’s hope!

Mark Trail, 6/12/13

Oh, man, I’ve been totally neglectful in keeping you up to date with the new storyline in Mark Trail, which involve otter poaching and otter traps and rescuing injured otters, and have been bubbling along on just this side of hilarity. But I think it’s safe to say that the sentence “How are the otters today, Rusty?” crosses that line at a pretty fast clip.

B.C., 6/12/13

The B.C. creative team apparently has only a vague idea of what the “internet” is or how one interacts with it.