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Dennis the Menace, 3/18/13

Oh, man, the knowing glances Dennis and Mrs. Wilson are exchanging here speak volumes. Mr. Wilson’s look of peaceful repose, hands crossed contentedly over his chest, can only mean one thing: he’s been dead for months, and Mrs. Wilson hasn’t told anyone so she can keep collecting those sweet Postal Service pension checks. Dennis found out, naturally, but just as naturally is happy to keep her secret, as long as Mrs. Wilson keeps the cookies coming. Preserving Mr. Wilson’s corpse through some no doubt ghastly home mortuary science was not strictly necessary for running the scam, of course; that’s just to allow Mrs. Wilson and Dennis to glory in their satisfaction at the old crank’s death.

Curtis, 3/18/13

Seeing as 90% of Curtis strips are variations on the same five or six jokes, I would not have picked it as the first newspaper comic to use the resignation of Pope Benedict as fodder for a punchline. Only five weeks after he quit, too! In the world of syndicated comic strips, that’s an amount of time that can only be detected with the most delicate of scientific instruments.

Slylock Fox, 3/18/13

More haunting evidence of the terrible cataclysm that wiped out humankind and left Earth in the hands paws of sentient beasts: although New York survived more or less intact, elsewhere whole mountain ranges were submerged by massive flooding. Typically, these creatures may be wearing hats and sailing boats and thinking they’re the ones in charge, but they’re still very keen to dig up some of the valuable remnants of the far superior civilization produced by the late lamented Homo sapiens.

Crock, 3/18/13

This camel is outraged that a bird wants to use his hump for sex.

Heathcliff, 3/18/13

It’s nice to see that Heathcliff and his owner went through the trouble of putting up a festive banner in their living room, to create some holiday context for just staying home and getting bombed out of their skulls.

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Family Circus, 3/17/13

I’m having fun trying to parse out Grandma’s relgio-moral philosophy from these three quotes. Here’s what I got: There is a creator God; sins can be forgiven, so long as you sincerely repent; but if you die unrepentant, there’s no purgatory or similar chance for forgiveness, so you’d better get your soul in order as if each moment could be your last. Do I have this right? I live it for wiser folk to figure out where she lies on the spectrum of Christian theology, but I do want to point out the hilarious middle panel, in which everyone was enjoying themselves watching basketball until she wandered in with dark warnings about the fact that death looms over us all, constantly.

Spider-Man, 3/17/13

So, why does Spider-Man even bother with a secret identity, anyway? Yeah, Peter, you worry about making noise while you climb up the side of a building, unmasked, in broad daylight, in order to get around an extremely minor inconvenience.

Panels from Beetle Bailey, 3/17/13

Beetle Bailey’s attempts to be sexy are exactly as misguided and off-putting as Beetle Bailey’s attempts to be funny.

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Pluggers, 3/16/13

Cats are a species that are always suspect when it comes to Real American Authenticity, so naturally the cat-plugger tends to be an outsider in the world of pluggerdom. Speaking as a cat-type myself, I’m not sure what exactly this panel is all about — are there baseball cards that don’t come with bubble gum? are they “fake,” somehow? wouldn’t old cards sold at a garage sale have stopped smelling like bubble gum years ago, assuming they aren’t in their original wrapper? — but it’s fun to see how sad the cat-plugger is at having his wares rejected. Haha, cat-plugger, your attempt to sell off these tiny bits of your childhood and some of your furniture in order to stave off economic catastrophe has been met with only scorn! Why don’t you go back to gay communist France, with your bogus baseball cards?

Mother Goose and Grim, 3/16/13

One of the central schticks of Mother Goose and Grimm is that Grimm the dog and Attila the cat cordially despise each other, but even still, Grimmy isn’t a narc. He knows that snitches get stitches! (Or more stitches, in this case.)

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/16/13

Nearly eight years after Mary Worth threw down the gauntlet, Rex Morgan looks poised to be the first syndicated continuity strip to feature a graphic vomiting scene. Just in time for a large-format full-color Sunday strip, too!

Mary Worth, 3/16/13

You guys, I’m starting a new meekcore band called Beth Kinley, and the title of our first single will be “I’ll Just Have Regular Water (If It’s Not Too Much Trouble)”.