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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.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/6/11

A recent trip to the mall left me idly contemplating the ways of modern capitalism. Did you know, young whippersnappers, that the corridors of indoor shopping malls used to stretch unbroken from the Foot Locker on the east to the Ann Taylor on the west, with plenty of room to walk and no kiosk in between hawking kibbutz-manufactured facial cream or calendars with cute cats on them or the same cell phones you could buy in two or more of the actual stores in the mall? You see, most shopping malls are owned by publicly traded corporations these days, and investors aren’t just satisfied with retail that makes more than it spends: it has to show an improved profit year after year, which for most older shopping malls means trying to extract more revenue from the same square footage, which in turn means that the broad indoor boulevards where old people used to power-walk are now cluttered with as many little store-shanties as management can cram in there.

In its own way, the mighty pharmaceutical industry is in the same boat. With most Americans now doped up on between two and six prescription medications at any given time, the drug companies need to cast an ever-broader net to find more customers for their wares. And if that means that pharmaceutical reps need to travel to isolated communities where you can still get burned at the stake for selling cures that aren’t root-based poultices, and then seduce lumpy-faced inbred nurses as if they were the villains of a Flannery O’Connor story, then so be it. The demands of the capital markets are remorseless.

Mark Trail, 6/6/11

“You have to return to your loved ones once every six months or so, and make a few days’ worth of awkward small talk! That’s what I do! Don’t worry, you don’t have a wife, so you won’t have to touch lips with anybody.”

Crankshaft, 6/6/11

Ha ha, it’s funny because everyone hates the bus drivers and wants them to quit! Some people are trying to make sure they quit, by threatening violence against them. That … that’s the punchline?