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Gil Thorp, 10/30/10

The Mystery Of What Exactly Cody Exner Is Doing Down At The Park is temporarily on hold, because at last we’re going to get a solution to another mystery, one that’s been brewing ever since Jamaar “The Ghost” Gaddis appeared in the strip a year or two ago, namely The Mystery Of Why Jamaar Is Such A Dick. Turns out it’s because he’s consumed with rage against the cruel God who made him such a wee fellow! But both mysteries may be dovetailing together with the image of a sweaty, crazy-eyed Cody in panel three. Perhaps Cody has been stealing away to the park to conduct his secretive experiments in mad science, and he’s in ecstasy now that he realizes that he’s finally found a willing subject for injection with his dangerous, untested embigiffication serum.

Dick Tracy, 10/30/10

So it seems that David Dierdorf D’Buckworth took on the life of a fake hobo who hands out huge sums of money because he couldn’t stand his wife. Which totally makes sense! Women, am I right, fellas? Can’t live with ’em, so you might as well pretend to be homeless! Haw haw! Anyway, now she’s going to shoot him in the face.

Slylock Fox, 10/30/10

Hey, kids, remember, have a safe Halloween! Always go out in groups! Stick close with your family! And be sure to pop unexpectedly out of a jack-o-lantern, with eyes the size of dinner plates, waving a knife around and gibbering like a maniac, which should go over well with everybody.

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Family Circus and Dennis the Menace, 10/29/10

These two parents-on-the-floor panels were immediately adjacent to each other on my Chron page today, which allowed me to quickly come up with a game I like to call “Who’s the sociopath?” In the Family Circus it’s clearly Daddy, who’s sporting a sick little smile as he allows Jeffy’s utter terror and desperation to go on much longer than anyone should be comfortable with. (It should come as no surprise that budding sadist Billy can barely contain his glee at his brother’s panic.) Dennis, meanwhile, isn’t even deriving any joy from having literally knocked his mother out of her shoes and fused her brains into a molten lump. “Mommy isn’t moving anymore,” he tells his father, stone-faced. “Will we need to get a new mommy?”

Pluggers, 10/29/10

It’s true: blanket-stealing is only perpetrated by honest heartland folks of the sort depicted in Pluggers. We coastal elitists don’t worry about it, because we sleep under mile-long blankets woven out of feathers stolen from the wings of angels.

IMPORTANT SOCIAL NETWORKING UPDATE! You might recall from Wednesday that Mayor Dalton’s prostate has its own Pacebook page. It now also has its own page on Facebook, a somewhat more popular social networking service. Feel free to “like” it, or whatever you kids do!

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Shoe, 10/28/10

No, my friend, your eyes do not fail you! That is a genuine URL medallion floating above Shoe’s head in panel two of Shoe, directing you to treetopstattler.com! One would assume that it was intended to be understood as having been affixed to the wall of the newsroom of the Treetops Tattler, the in-Shoe-universe newspaper for which most of the main characters toil, except that I think we’re also meant to understand that the Tattler newsroom is not a room as such but rather a bunch of office furniture balanced precariously on tree limbs, and thus does not actually have walls. Maybe the URL medallion is suspended from the branches that are obscured by Shoe’s word balloon? Anyway, treettopstattler.com just redirects you to the main Shoe site, which, in addition to Shoe strips, also features some fake Treetops Tattler news items that are mildly amusing. I mainly just want to praise the strip for recognizing that this “Internet” thing exists and perhaps should be taken advantage of in some way, which is an attitude largely foreign to the newspaper comics world.

In other word, the entire Tatter staff appears to have fallen asleep and, if I’m understanding the implication of Shoe’s statement, soiled themselves.

Marvin, 10/28/10

Ha ha, the erotic bond that once linked Marvin and his mother is now broken, maybe because he now recognizes how freakishly out of proportion her head is to her body, or maybe because HE IS A BABY AND SHE IS HIS MOTHER OH MY GOD THIS IS MONSTROUS.

Apartment 3-G, 10/28/10

“We both think you’re a boring lame-o!”

I find it interesting that both Tommie and Lu Ann are supposed to have distant and uninterested parents. This explains why both of them are drawn to Margo — both because she offers the combination of vague affection and soul-scraping disdain that they have come to associate with parental love, and because her own parental situation (lying, philandering dad; histrionic ethnic stereotype mom; pill-crazed, gun-toting stepmom) reminds them that, you know, you could do a lot worse than “distant and uninterested.”