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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.

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Ziggy, 6/7/11

One of the most shameful moments in the life of any social reject comes when they’re offered the chance to join in on the mockery of someone even lower on the ladder than they are. You might imagine yourself a noble defender of nerd solidarity, but too often, after years of feeling the brunt of teasing and cruelty, the opportunity to step to the other side of the social predator/prey line and feel cool, if only for an instant, is too tempting to resist. If you have shred of humanity, you’re haunted by it later — certainly I am, for the few times I briefly switched teams in my dorky adolescence — but I imagine it’s a pretty universal phenomenon.

I bring this up because Ziggy, who is usually the butt of cruel jibes from his various pets, seems to be enjoying the fact that his vicious parrot is mocking the dog, for once. Ziggy, they’ll never accept you. Try to maintain a little dignity!

Hagar the Horrible, 6/7/11

Hagar the Horrible is one of the most violent strips on the comics page, but I’m pretty sure it’s never depicted an actual corpse before. It’s possible that the poor nameless viking’s awful staring eye isn’t frozen open in death, but merely indicative of the shock he’s entered as a result of his massive and almost certainly fatal wounds, but either way this seems especially grim.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/7/11

This is happiest we’ve seen Funky in years. Naturally, it’s because multiple people that he ostensibly cares about are in painful emotional turmoil.

Marmaduke, 6/7/11

Marmaduke was the hero of the game, presumably because he ate all the children on the other team.