Post Content

Crankshaft, 12/15/11

This would just be yet another Crankshaft in which the title character sits on the couch silently while the TV makes a terrible, terrible joke at him, if not for the carefully rendered expression of pure, incandescent rage on his face in that final panel. I mean, really, Crankshaft is always on the spectrum between dyspeptic and pissed off, but this looks like he’s finally snapped. It’s hard to say why, exactly — maybe he knows that he’s naughty and doesn’t want to be lumped in with the terrorists, maybe he’s insulted that the local news has stooped to this level of holiday jocularity, maybe he’s just finally worked out the grand conspiracy that everyone in the world is in on together, against him — but I’m assuming that he’s on the verge of filling his school bus with guns and ammunition and driving straight into a police station, just to see what’ll happen.

Family Circus, 12/15/11

Dolly is playing here with the lyrics to “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town,” lyrics that, if you live in the United States and have left your house to enter a retail establishment of any sort in the past three weeks, I’m assuming you have running unbidden through your brain. Still, I kind of wish that the Family Circus scheduling computer had accidentally spat out this panel sometime in June. If you read it then, you’d probably assume that Dolly is just enforcing false joyfulness on general principles and has had enough of PJ’s sullen, rebel-without-a-cause attitude, because in this house we sit up straight and smile even if we’re not happy, mister.

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 12/14/11

Oh, hey, it looks like this year’s current basketball plot will bring back some mildly beloved characters from last winter, including the witty, fashion-forward, Glee-and-Project-Runway-loving, do-we-have-to-spell-it-out-for-you, well-too-bad-we’re-not-going-to-for-some-reason Lini Verde. Lini gives Lopat’s new tattoo the savagely hilarious put-down it probably deserves (not that any of us reading at home would know, since the strip stubbornly refuses to actually show it to us), but I’m more interested in the fact that Lini is pushing his freakishly long finger straight into his face, presumably to distract himself from the fact that he needs to spend another year minimum surrounded by these witless cretins.

Pluggers, 12/14/11

Ha ha, it’s funny because pluggers’ friends are all dying, and they’re too tired or scared to make new ones! You know, if I were this he-plugger I’d be concerned by where exactly his wife is going with this conversation, because it sounds to me that she’s about to float her idea for a murder-suicide pact.

Post Content

Mark Trail, 12/13/11

Hey, guys, Mark Trail has a superpower! With a single command, he can turn lovable domesticated dogs into slavering attack-beasts that can take on a whole pack of wolves. It doesn’t matter if they have adorable names like “Andy” and “Princess!” They will be unstoppable!

Ziggy, 12/13/11

It’s true: Ziggy has always been a hairless, squat, pantsless, joy-killing gnome-thing, ever since the beginning of time.