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Last day of the month, last day of the week … and it’s time for your top comment!

“‘Seriously, brat is an obscenity, right? Like it’s really really dirty?’ wonders Marty Moon, the man who never got an A on his vocabulary quizzes. ‘I think it’s short for bratgina.’” –made of wince

And your very funny runners up!

“I hope someone’s phone is recording the vegetation behind the fence, which is moving upward at an alarming rate.” –Lee Sherman

“In Hootin’ Hollar, the big box store is actually a big cardboard packing crate that fell out of a pickup truck when it hit a pothole.” –Dennis Jimenez

“Since the sun is clearly flattening and about to go supernova outside the barracks window, today’s Beetle Bailey is surprisingly philosophical. Sarge is clearly of the mind that everybody should hurry up and get done whatever they need to in order to prepare for meeting their maker. Get going, for as Paul of Tarsus says, the time is short! On the other hand, Beetle takes the hedonistic view. It’s the last day on earth, just do what you want! Lounge about in bed all day masturbating, who cares? Too bad for Beetle that the end of the world isn’t happening on Miss Buxley Wednesday when he might have had a shot at losing his virginity, but eh, it’s too late to worry about that now.” –Thelonious_Nick

“Meanwhile, Marvin’s mother silently bemoans that she wasn’t facing an egg shortage somewhere between the last two and five years.” –Voshkod

“Enduring focus on cost controls and ability to adapt to inflationary market pressures be damned, Marvin remembers the record corporate profits for America’s egg wholesalers, and he’s warning everyone who reads the daily comics. The grandmothers will never forget, do you hear me? Never!” –I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV

“Beetle picking a bed that faces west so he won’t be woken by the rising sun rings true.” –nescio

“In panel three, Miz Prunelly is attempting to subtly reach the pencil in her hair, the better to stab Jughaid and then, possibly, herself.” –Pozzo

“Given the vast number of chicken-borne parasites that are certainly circulating through the population of Hootin’ Holler, what Jughaid is really discovering is more than love of germs. It’s biological symbiosis.” –Vice President John Adams

“Today’s Phantom made me think of a question I didn’t know I had until now: Why is the pelvic area of a superhero’s costume so often a different color than the rest of it? Either it’s sewn that way or it’s a separate piece of Spandex, and either way, I’m unsure as to its utility. Is it steel-reinforced, to provide some manner of protection? Is it to draw the eye right to the crotch, so as to give Our Hero the advantage in making the first move? ‘Behold and tremble at the sight of my area, villains! Prepare to be thwarted by he of the purple bod and stripèd rod!’” –els

“That’s not what organic means, but coincidentally, yes, it is made of hearts, livers and lungs. It’s a great big bowl of haggis. They don’t make a big deal of it, but Hi and Lois is actually set in Scotland. You can tell because their neighbour has the extremely Scottish name ‘Thurston’, and also because he’s a drunk.” –Schroduck

“The humans all scream ‘MAXIMUM EFFORT‘ as Max leads them onto the Interstate.” –UncleJeff

“I like the way Dennis is holding his hands. He’s thinking that if he had a large rock in each hand, he could finally hit TWO kids in the face at once. ‘No, no, the rocks are even bigger than that. Yeah, bigger.’” –BeckoningChasm

“Alice looks sad, as she didn’t even get to host this woman for afternoon tea before Dennis tanked yet another desperate attempt to have adult friends.” –Philip

“Dennis appears to be contemplating the possibility of dumping Joey and getting two matching henchmen in his place.” –Tabby Lavalamp

“I guess people sigh a lot! I tried to force a laugh at this cartoon, but all that came out was dust.” –Amelie Wikström

“Um … but these angels already have hair in those places! Why not just admit that they created the physical template for humankind by lying down on a Xerox machine?” –BigTed

“Look at that warm, motherly smile on Thel’s face as she imagines her idiot child attempting to fit two AAAs into a perished insect. Kids do the cutest desecrations of the dead.” –jroggs

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Blondie, 6/30/23

The idea of being put in a situation where you respond to someone awkwardly in the moment and dwell on it later is of course relatable. I would think that a fun way to grapple with that situation in an art form like the comics would be to think up a snappy response at your leisure and then write up a little scenario where you get to use it in the moment, rather than doing a strip where you flop and then are embarrassed and resentful for the rest of the day. I guess that’s why I’m just a humble critic and not actually the writer of a widely syndicated newspaper strip (I also did not inherit a widely beloved syndicated newspaper strip from my father, which may be a factor there).

Family Circus, 6/30/23

I’m really enjoying Ma Keane’s little smile here. “Should I tell him it’s dead now, and watch his little face crumble? Or would it be more fun to see him walking around with a dead bug in a jar for the rest of the day?”

Hi and Lois, 6/30/23

“People like getting bombed, kid. Why not ask Mr. Thurston about it? If he’s not ‘asleep.’”

Six Chix, 6/30/23

The crotch is next, folks. The crotch is next

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Six Chix, 6/29/23

The verb scoff, dictionaries will tell you, means to speak derisively about someone or something, or treat them with scorn, and that’s how I’ve used it pretty much my whole adult life. But recently I began to have a panicked feeling that I’ve been wrong, because in closed captioning for most movies or TV shows, the word is often put in brackets to indicate that a character is making a dismissive little noise like “tcha” or thereabouts. Was the noise scoffing, and I had incorrectly extended it to metaphorically describe the attitude that the noise conveyed? I had not, but was primed to worry about this because it would be the opposite trajectory of a habit I had in my youth, when I read Peanuts anthologies obsessively and correctly understood from them that “sigh” was an expression of melancholy, but didn’t understand that in those strips it was standing in for a nonverbal sound so I just went around saying the word “sigh” aloud when I was sad or wistful. No adult ever corrected me on this, presumably because it was very, very funny. Anyway, that’s what I always think about when I see the word “sigh” in a comic or indeed anywhere else. I have no idea what today’s Six Chix is getting at.

Dennis the Menace, 6/29/23

I absolutely love the look on this lady’s face. She just met Dennis and has already determined that she has zero time for his shit. Honestly, more people should take this attitude towards him, it might improve his behavior considerably.