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Hi and Lois, 4/23/10

Comics aren’t just casual fun entertainment; they can also help you grapple with everyday but still painful life dilemmas. For instance, what if your son, who you love very much and who you only want to help succeed in life and be happy, turns out to be a terrible, miserable failure? Worse, what if he’s unable to recognize his own incompetence, and runs to you, his loving, nurturing parent, for the emotional affirmation that he’s learned to expect from you? How do you react? Hi and Lois doesn’t claim to have the answers, but Hi’s frozen, heartbroken expression in the final panel at least assures you that, if you’ve ever found yourself face to embarrassing face with your useless hump of an offspring, you’re not alone.

Dennis the Menace, 4/23/10

Making sex-themed jokes about cartoon kids is a little discomfort-making even for me, but then I’m not the one who used as the punchline for my child-populated comic a Las Vegas marketing slogan carefully constructed to evoke images of binge drinking and strip clubs, am I? Anyway, the most icky thing about this comic is the contrast between how pleased Margaret looks and how angry Dennis is at the thought that the smooching news might get out. Looks like he’s gearing up to be Dennis the emotional menace, am I right?

B.C., 4/23/10

Totally not at all discomfort-making or squicky to me at all is this apparent depiction of one reptile paying another for some kind of emotiono-sexual service. It’s like he’s a dominatrix, but with cuddling? And also he’s a turtle? Anyway, it’s all good clean fun!

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Phantom, 4/22/10

I know that there’s been an uptick in security measures at airports since 9/11, but I think sleepy Westchester County Airport’s decision to acquire anti-aircraft weaponry may be an overreaction to current threats. Where will this escalation end? Will any of us sleep soundly at night once Yonkers has nukes?

Judge Parker, 4/22/10

Kudos to new artist Mike Manley for continuing the Judge Parker tradition of having female characters vamp sexily while the usual plot tedium drones on around them. “Anxiety attacks? How erotic,” panel three Neddy is thinking, from the looks of it.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/22/10

“And anyone who doesn’t want to burn to death when I torch it for the insurance money has about three minutes to get the hell out.”

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Funky Winkerbean, 4/21/10

Funky Winkerbean’s trip to New York featured a few moments of publishing hope for long-suffering victim Les (though surely we’ll see those dreams get squashed later), but we’ve quickly moved back to familiar territory: impotent, misplaced rage. Actually, “rage” is the wrong word: the dialogue seems rage-y enough, but the slouchy body language and numb faces denote a total absence of the passion that is rage’s necessary prerequisite. I stand by the impotence, though.

And the misplacement. There are any number of greedy, amoral morons who can be blamed for our current macroeconomic state of affairs; but, assuming that Funky is maundering about the failure of the Montoni’s franchise in New York to take off, I think it’s unlikely that, even in the best of economies, crappy midwestern pizza would have been a big hit in a city well known for its many well-established and much-loved pizza vendors. It’s not like Goldman Sachs was nefariously creating synthetic CDOs based on pizza futures and then betting against them.

Beetle Bailey, 4/21/10

Towards the end of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, God is briefly depicted as an enormous flaming aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The God of Beetle Bailey is much less impressive, consisting merely of the tiny and non-fiery Name of the strip’s creator. Today, God is attempting to make Beetle sound like someone you might actually want to go on a date with, with mixed results.

Mark Trail, 4/21/10

From my long and dedicated observation of the fauna in this strip, I’ve learned that when a senator starts emitting visible sweatballs, he is on the verge of a heart attack. This is a good illustration of the moral difference between our two rival lawmakers: Senator Good Senator only suffered a cardiac event after engaging in righteous fisticuffs with some longhair, while Senator Bad Senator’s heart is going south as soon as he realizes that arrest and/or punching might be in his future.

B.C., 4/21/10

Ha ha! The bird is afraid of being killed and eaten, but the snake thinks that the bird is afraid of being sexually assaulted!

Marmaduke, 4/21/10

Yeah, so, uh, this happened. Let’s never speak of it again, shall we?