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Beetle Bailey, 6/10/11

You might have doubts that Plato, Camp Swampy’s resident braniac, would pass his time reading the bluntly named Weird Stuff. But at least he’s leagues ahead of Beetle, who apparently isn’t intellectually equipped to deal with words or even pictures and is instead just perusing some publication that consists entirely of colored squares arranged in simple patterns. “Ooh, it’s the red-yellow issue!”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/10/11

What are we to make of the fact that a host of mosquitos buzz into this strip only after we learn that Eliviney has doused herself with some dubious home-made insect repellent? It could be that we’re supposed to believe that this homemade Off knockoff is of such low quality that it actually attracts bugs; however, I prefer to think that Hootin’ Holler, among all of its other well-known negative qualities, is permanently afflicted by thousands of mosquitos, whose presence we normally aren’t privy to because they’d be tedious to draw. Panel two shows us the hellish bug-world in which the characters live at all times, just to emphasize why extreme measures of homemade chemistry are necessary in this case.

Dennis the Menace, 6/10/11

Dennis and Joey are already gravitating towards activities that compensate for their lack of skills. I guess having low expectations for yourself is kind of menacing?

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Spider-Man, 6/9/11

Every once in a while Spider-Man feels like it needs to let us take a breather from its nonstop lazy superhero action and dabble in a little media criticism. As you can tell from the the arc here — “But your photojournalism could hurt feelings!” “Eh, probably not, and anyway, I gotta buy you stuff.” “Oh, OK!” — it’s generally as half-assed as everything else in this comic.

Crankshaft, 6/9/11

I am seething with anger over this comic’s misrepresentation of modern youth. Oh, kids today are in fact Internet-addicted drunks, I’m not denying that; but it’s also well known that children’s bus chants by their very nature scan quite well. The dialog in that first panel simply cannot be chanted in the implied sing-songy fashion, no matter how hard you try.

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Momma, 6/8/11

I spent last weekend in Rehoboth Beach in Delaware, and it was too cold to swim (which was just as well, seeing as the water was apparently full of dead fish), so I mostly sat in a chair on the beach, reading and relaxing. One feature of Rehoboth that I find charmingly old-school is that the beaches are buzzed on a fairly regular basis by little planes dragging advertising behind them. The three ads I saw most often were for:

• Wawa’s “Hoagiefest,” a sale on sandwiches at a chain of gas stations;
• The Hair Cuttery, a mall-based salon that charges $11 and attempts to give you a haircut as fast as humanly possible without actually stabbing you in the eye; and
• A local bar advertising a special on Natty Bohs, which, though as a Baltimorean I appreciate their social significance, I must point out are especially cheap and shitty beers.

Though I try to avoid thinking profound thoughts about the world while on vacation, I really couldn’t help but wonder at how such apparently chintzy retail establishments could afford the hundreds if not thousands of dollars necessary to fill an aircraft with fossil fuels and have it fly a sign back and forth for the benefit of what couldn’t have been more than a few hundred beach-goers on a not particularly warm non-holiday weekend. It made me realize that, no matter how much the economy is contracting, we live in a society of incredible affluence, on an absolute scale. And in such a society, isn’t there at least one job that could employ Francis? Or maybe couldn’t someone just pay him minimum wage to leave his mother alone? Couldn’t his mother have paid him to busy himself, with the money she spent on this aeronautical advertising gig?

The Lockhorns, 6/8/11

Loretta is addicted to porn sites featuring sexy black men, which, since one must assume that her sex fantasies involve people who are pretty much the opposite of her squat, pale husband, makes perfect sense.