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Family Circus, 6/11/13

Hey, everyone, grown-up Keane Kid Jeff Keane is once again pretending to be his older brother Glen’s in-panel avatar Billy filling in for his deceased father, who we’re pretending is still in charge of drawing the strip. Got it? Anyway, this hall-of-mirrors meta-version of Billy is gracing us with illustrated puns this week, and it’s only Tuesday and we’ve already reached ULTIMATE NIGHTMARE LEVEL. Ha ha, look, it’s a majestic lion, king of beasts, lying dead, the vague odor of rot already beginning to waft up from him. A horrifyingly cheerful Big Daddy Keane stands only inches away and pelts the corpse with bloody chunks of meat. I mean, I guess if you’ve already decided that “meat” as a transitive verb means “hurl raw steak at,” why not go all the way into horror, you know?

Better Half, 6/11/13

Speaking of rotting meat, it sounds like Stanley’s past his due date, and will be dead soon! Maybe he’s already putrefying from within? I was going to say that there has to be a sexier set-up for noticing something on your spouse’s naked body than “checking each other for suspicious moles,” but considering Harriet’s husband is a walking semi-corpse, who can blame her here.

Heathcliff, 6/11/13

I guess I would judge a seafood restaurant’s quality not only by the number of cats it attracts, but also by its ability and determination to keep said cats out of the dining areas? Anyway, behind that middle door there’s just a room full of sand and cat shit, FYI.

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Dennis the Menace and Heathcliff, 6/10/13

Since my main beef with Dennis the Menace is that he long ago ceased to be menacing, I feel obliged to acknowledge the flashes of menace we do see. Just trying to return some ice cream that you’ve already gotten your gross spit all over is less “menacing” than “kind of a dick move,” but I choose to believe that Dennis took the ice cream cone from this guy, gave it several long, languorous licks over a period about 45 seconds, all while maintaining unbroken eye contact, then thrust it back at him, saying “I don’t like this, give me money back.”

Heathcliff, meanwhile, is generally well known for a just-don’t-give-a-shit attitude of the sort that Dennis aspires to. However, here we see that he’s willing to kiss a little ass if that’s what it takes to get what he wants, which frankly saddens me.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/10/13

This strip has spent decades making jokes at the expense of rural Americans, but today’s strip, which implies that country folk are interbreeding with evolutionary throwbacks and other nonhuman hominids, goes too far.

Shoe, 6/10/13

This scene of newspapermen (or newspaperman-birds, I guess) blaming each other for the decline of their industry by spinning a nautical metaphor further and further out of usefulness is, I’m pretty sure, a fairly spot-on depiction of the modern media landscape.

Apartment 3-G, 6/10/13

“You’re kidding, right?! I’m not going to let you wear a white dress in front of a photographers. Lu Ann, you spill things a lot.’

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Better Half, 6/9/13

Sundays are great because we get a quadruple dose of the Parkers, the adorable, relatable couple we know so well. What ordinary life problems are these two grappling with this weekend? Clockwise from top left:

• Harriet is so unhealthily obsessed with her weight that she literally fantasizes about losing parts of her body, just so that she can see that number on the scale get smaller.
• No matter what time of day or night it is, Stanley is just sitting around the house, hazily slipping in and out of consicousness.
• Meanwhile when Harriet falls asleep, she immediately falls into the grips of intense anxiety dreams.
• Stanley’s body is falling apart.

Hagar the Horrible, 6/9/13

As a bloodthirsty Viking chieftan, Hagar has sacked and burned countless villages across Europe, and rules his own warrior band by threat of brutal violence. It should really come as no surprise that somebody’s trying to assassinate him.