Comment of the Week

My little friend is not so little anymore, Toby! In fact, she's quite large! Enormous, in fact! Nine foot six and getting taller by the day! It's actually quite alarming! We're getting into I'm a Virgo territory here! Did you watch that miniseries, by the way? It was on Amazon Prime a couple of years ago! Jharrel Jerome is a treasure! Some great performances by Elijah Wood and Walton Goggins as well, which reminds me that I need to start my Justified rewatch. Oh, Margo Martindale is another treasure, especially as a voice in BoJack Horseman. Anyway, Olive is a giant, is the point I'm trying to make.

els

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Crankshaft, 7/9/13

One of Crankshaft’s go-to humor-producing techniques is “olds say the darndest things,” which I’m assuming is what this is supposed to be. Or maybe it’s “Grandma Rose is heartless and cruel and always will be,” another classic Crankshaft comedy gold mine. Whichever it is, though, today I approve of it, because it produced “Your father puts ketchup on so many inappropriate things,” which is surely the greatest sentence that will appear in the comics all week, and perhaps all month. It’s positively poetic. In fact, I urge all of you poetically inclined folk to make it the first line in a poem of your own design in the comments. I expect Pulitzer Prize-winning greatness.

Spider-Man, 7/9/13

Holy crap, you guys, today’s Spider-Man pulls back the curtain on a White House scandal worse than the IRS + Benghazi + NSA spying times one billion! First we learned that the President answers each and every phone call from befuddled TSA agents nationwide, which surely isn’t an efficient use of his time. And he uses this bureaucratic power that he’s arrogated to himself to allow whatever liberal masked hoodlums he holds in high esteem to board our nation’s otherwise well-secured aircraft. But most damning is the fact that hanging in the Oval Office is a ghastly, miscolored parody of our national flag. That flag is red, white, and black — the same colors of the banner of Nazi Germany. WHEN WILL YOU WAKE UP, SHEEPLE?????

Apartment 3-G, 7/9/13

Well, I guess I was wrong about us never seeing any of the fancy clothes that Lu Ann is being forced to try on by the creepy governor’s creepy svengali! Here she is wearing a fancy new gown. That’s what a fancy new gown looks like in real life, right? With a lacy collar? And a belt? And it’s all the color of Pepto-Bismol, including the collar and the belt? And it covers every inch of flesh below the collarbone and (I assume) above the wrists? This is high fashion?

Gasoline Alley, 7/9/13

Oh, goody, idiot man-child Slim, having been abandoned by his wife and obviously being unable to fend for himself in any way, is descending into catatonic depression. He’s already had one brush with insanity that he bounced back from, but we can only hope that his current downward spiral is permanent.

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Spider-Man, 7/8/13

Good news, guys! Spider-Man’s ill-thought-out scheme to avoid having to make up some semi-believable explanation to a bored TSA agent about why he has a Spider-Man costume in luggage by wearing his Spider-Man costume and then making a dick of himself by climbing all over the walls has succeeded! Not because of any real heroics, or because he had a plan of any sort in place, obviously, but because somebody in the layer of Homeland Security bureaucracy that a TSA agent can reach via walky-talky told said TSA agent to “make this stop happening in such a way that I don’t have to ever hear about it again.” Still, Spidey is right to celebrate! Any conflict that doesn’t end with him accidentally knocking himself unconscious is a triumph!

Heathcliff, 7/8/13

OK, so I know fish don’t have eyelids and so their eyes appear to be staring at you in unblinking horror long after they’re dead, and that Heathcliff has stolen this dead fish and put a helmet it on it for joke/whimsy purposes as he razor-scooters off. But still, I choose to interpret the scene thusly: that fish is still alive, and is aware that he’s being carted for eating. His expression indicates not so much horror as a bemused resignation. “Oh, so I’m on a razor scooter now, with a cat. Greeeeaat.”

Mary Worth, 7/8/13

“I sure am enjoying this copy of Person magazine! It’s a great resource for finding out what sort of behavior patterns persons find normal. Plus, it’s a magazine that only persons read! Says so right in the name! Why, it certainly wouldn’t be purchased and read ostentatiously by some sort of space-lizard wearing a human meatsuit disguise! Ha ha!”

Six Chix, 7/8/13

Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that the Six Chix were competing amongst themselves to see who could create a cartoon with the most horribly mangled corpse in it. Explains a lot!

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 7/7/13

There are many mysteries about the process by which our own, human-dominated world became the Slylock-era planet ruled by animals of various degrees of sentience, living it up in the ruins of our civilization, with a few scattered remnants of Homo sapiens surviving here and there. One of the more minor ones is this: why is Count Weirdly, supposed human, green? Ironically, all we learn today is what isn’t the cause of his odd coloring: Weirdly’s grandiose claims of expert genetic engineering turning him into a human-plant hybrid turn out to be nonsense. But the very fact that the claims were made just raises more questions. For instance, would having some non-human DNA boost Weirdly’s status in this post-human hellscape? And, given that we know that genetic experimentation is forbidden by law, how shocking or embarrassing is the real reason, to prompt Weirdly to make these dangerous claims? Is it just body paint? Did he just start painting himself green in a moment of madness, and now he feels like he needs some higher-tech explanation, to protect his reputation? You shouldn’t be embarrassed by body paint, Count. Your antagonist is a fox wearing pants.

Crankshaft, 7/7/13

In today’s Crankshaft, one of the main characters experiences a brief, fleeting moment of happiness before being subsumed by a crushing wave of anxiety. I guess we’re meant to feel good about this, though, because in panel two Pam looks unbearably smug, presumably in a narrative bid to make the audience clamor for retribution for her hubris.