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Shoe, 6/19/13

Longtime readers of my blog know about one of my main beefs with Shoe: the Goggle Eyes of Horror that often appear in the final panel. These have the effect of implying that someone has uttered some unspeakable nightmare-sentence, when usually they’re making a gentle and dumb pun. Today’s instance of this visual trope has me particularly baffled/enraged. Frito the Parrot (and let’s just stop for a minute to acknowledge: FRITO THE PARROT, ye gods) has met a comely she-parrot at Parrots Without Partners! Assuming you’ve accepted a terrifying world of sentient talking birds, this is a perfectly reasonable name for an organization that arranges parrot-on-parrot romance, so it’s not clear why Shoe would be so shocked; the name’s a spoof of an actual organization, Parents Without Partners, but presumably Shoe would be thoroughly unaware of that, since the protective barrier between his reality and ours remains intact, last I looked. All I can assume is that Shoe, who has been shown to flirt with sexy lady birds of multiple species, is appalled at Frito’s racist decision to join an ethnically pure parrots-only dating service.

Gil Thorp, 6/19/13

Gil Thorp remains unspeakably dull, but I always feel obliged to alert you when we finally get to that point in the season where whatever Milford team we’re paying attention to fails to win a championship. And here we are!

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Spider-Man, 6/18/13

True story: Once, when I was living in California, I got the time zone math backwards and called my dad and stepmother at 11 p.m. my time, thinking that it was 8 p.m. on the East Coast when of course it was 2 a.m., and naturally they were less than thrilled about this. I should add that this was after nearly four years of living on the West Coast, so it’s not like I had any kind of excuse. Anyway, what I’m saying is that MJ has been sitting by the phone with no doubt increasing amounts of irritation waiting for Peter call while he’s been screwing around on the beach or whatever, and maybe he shouldn’t sound quite so insufferably smug in panel two? I mean, MJ still probably wouldn’t want him to come back, seeing as she’s already changed the locks on the apartment and had his name taken off their bank accounts, but still, it’s poor form.

Crock, 6/18/13

I love that “HMO” is bolded in the last panel, just so we don’t miss the point. “Ha, this HMO is crueler than I am, and my notorious cruelty is central joke of the strip! HMO! Eh? Social commentary? Right?”

Beetle Bailey, 6/18/13

Specialist Chip Gizmo, the adorably nerdy character introduced to Beetle Bailey in 2002 to bring some techno-savvy to the strip, has built himself a sex robot with metal breasts and sharp, claw-like hands! If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to spend the rest of the day screaming now.

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Heathcliff, 6/17/13

Lots of people like cake, you know. Really like cake. Very few of them use this like of cake as the ideological basis for an independent cake-empire, which declares its separation from the insufficiently cake-worshipping polity to which it previous owed allegiance and then presumably goes on to aggressively impose cake-adoration on its unwilling neighbors. Heathcliff, as ever, does not do anything by half measures.

Crankshaft, 6/17/13

Oh, goodie, it’s been months since Crankshaft journeyed to New York to make vaguely New York-themed puns! But first, in today’s third panel, we’re treated to the precise moment when Pam gives up on trying to make her dad love her.

Spider-Man, 6/17/13

“With the Kingpin in custody” is kind of an obscure way to say “Now that we’ve finished having surreptitious beach-sex, let’s talk loudly and ostentatiously about our supposed romantic entanglements with women,” but I don’t want to tell you guys how to live your lives.