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Lockhorns, 7/25/11

I am absolutely in love with the enormous frown on the kid’s face in this panel. It’s like, he’s just gone down to the newsstand to buy the latest Superman comic (because like all of today’s youth he loves twee retro affectations). He didn’t expect to be harassed by some squat middle-aged stranger. Certainly he didn’t expect to be offered an observation so dense with emotional anguish and post-love ennui; he’s far too young to really understand it, but he feels the pain of it flowing out of Leroy and crashing over him in waves. He’s going home a changed person, and he’s going to be looking in his funnybooks for the real stories, the stories about what makes people human (hint: it’s suffering).

Slylock Fox, 7/25/11

Once again, Slylock proves that he simply can’t stop with the sleuthing after tiny clues, even when it isn’t necessary. I’ll bet he makes the poor techs down at the CSI lab work for days with him on figuring out the make of the tires that left those treads in the concrete before finally admitting that he also has access to the perp’s license plate, which they could connect to his registration and home address by spending about thirty seconds in front of the computer. I’m less interested in his sad and increasingly desperate little game than I am in the nattily attired duck standing on the corner. While everyone else in the neighborhood appears traumatized by the reign of automotive terror that just blew through the subdivision, he just stares forward with big, soulless eyes, like he’s a jarring minor character from a David Lynch film.

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Panels from Dennis the Menace, 7/24/11

Alice Mitchell has suffered so much horror at Dennis’s hands that she’s responding the only way that makes sense — by numbing herself to all sensory input. Look, her vision is already fading! She can’t even make out her husband’s eyes anymore.

Panels from Apartment 3-G, 7/24/11

“I’m freeing my son from the clutches of these quacks, with their so-called ‘x-ray machines!’ Come on, we’ll take you home and get some leeches on that arm right away.”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/23/11

So, when I demanded a return to the non-old-people-liver-transplant storyline in Rex Morgan, I was really more hoping for more mother-daughter squabbling and less earnest talk about modern best practices for medical record-keeping. You can tell that Rex is eating this stuff up, though, closing his eyes and letting the jargon just wash right over him. “Oooh, you used an abbreviation! Yeah, that’s the stuff.”

Dennis the Menace, 7/23/11

I’m gonna be honest with you — if I saw a black polo shirt with a red collar in real life in an adult size, I would buy and wear the crap out of it. I don’t think I’d pair it up with red pants, but I think it’s an interesting and striking color combo. I was so taken with it that it took me a moment to realize that Dennis is going for a whole new kind of unsettling menacing: attempting to put the moves on his cousin.

Hi and Lois, 7/23/11

My goodness, look at how happy Lois looks! Dot and Ditto, don’t you dare touch her — she’s obviously in some magical dreamland, one where she doesn’t have any annoying children. Even the most terrible sunburn will be a fair price for just a few more minutes there.

Apartment 3-G, 7/23/11

“Me? How could I be a mother? I don’t even know where babies come from!”