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Cleats, 1/22/10

On those occasions when I think of Cleats, I think of “gentle (to the point of blandness) humor punctuated by bouts of unspeakable horror.’ This week’s installment, focusing on the whimsical subject of “Bigfoot football,” has mostly been on the gentle-to-the-point-of-blandness side, but only today did I notice that the Sasquatches are using the withered corpse of a beaver as their ball. So that’s something, I guess.

Family Circus, 1/22/10

Dolly, you panderer! The snowman and snowlady should not be left alone in the yard together until they’re married. This is exactly the sort of ideas you get from public schooling.

Hi and Lois, 1/22/10

Chip’s friend is wearing a little hat secured to his head with some sort of elastic chin strap, so, yeah, it’s probably a good idea that he’s reading Style magazine in the second panel.

The poster on the wall indicates that the boys are fans of Paul Butterfield Blues Band keyboardist Mark Naftalin, which is a little disappointing to me because at first glance I just thought they were proponents of free trade.

Mary Worth, 1/22/10

You’ve gotta feel bad for Dawn as she angrily swoops and dances around the nervous Mary. Not long ago her boyfriend cheated on her with another woman, and now she finds out that her father’s sperm cheated with another egg, before she was even born! I have to say that her withering “something” in the second panel is the piece of Mary Worth dialogue most loaded down with contempt since Mary threw “Capisce?” in Aldo’s face.

Spider-Man, 1/22/10

“He thinks I can point him to Wolverine! And he’ll keep attacking me until I do! Unless — I run away, like a coward! Yes, that’s it! Ha ha, can’t catch me, I have the proportional pusillanimity of a spider!”

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Hi and Lois, 1/21/10

Uh oh, it looks like that damn Women’s Lib has ruined storytime forever, am I right, fellas? Used to be little girls would hear medieval tales about being rescued from dragons and becoming some handsome man’s property and just eat it up, but now they want, like, social and economic autonomy and shit. The befuddled look on Hi and Ditto’s faces shows that they know that patriarchy has been fatally undermined.

Of course, Hi appears to be reading not so much out of a storybook as from a few pieces of loose-leaf paper folded down the middle to form a crude booklet with “ONCE UPON A TIME” scrawled across the front. Perhaps the inside is filled mostly with Hi’s rantings about how the 19th amendment brought about a gynocentric tyranny, which makes Dot’s response all the more reasonable.

Herb and Jamaal, 1/21/10

Herb seems to have been possessed by an extremely mellow demon, which has compelled him to casually pull the Bible off the shelf and spit on it. The holy book responds to this assault by releasing thick clouds of acrid smoke. Who will win this low-stakes battle for Herb’s immortal soul?

Mark Trail, 1/21/10

Meanwhile, the sinister Parker Brothers have struck at the … dudes … in the canoe … who I don’t know who they are … by running their outboard motor at them? I guess? Oh, that’s a punching for that, that is.

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Blondie, 1/20/10

I haven’t compiled an elaborate spreadsheet charting the time of day that the action in Blondie takes place or anything — that will be the point when I officially slip into the comics-obsessive deep end, and you are all allowed to officially have me put away when that happens — but my gut tells me that we’ve been seeing more nighttime episodes of late. This is all good with me, as I find that it gives the strip a sort of poignant charm that it desperately needs. Take today’s installment, for instance, in which Dagwood and Herb wander the otherwise empty sidewalks of their soulless exurb. They’re in their work gear, but it’s a well-known fact that they car-pool in to their generic white-collar jobs, and they live in the American sprawl zone where you can’t get anywhere without a car anyway, so where exactly are they supposed to be walking to? My guess is that they were dropped off in front of their bland low-slung off-white homes and had some sort of midlife crisis à deux, and are now walking around their subdivision jabbering nonsense as they psych themselves up to abandon their families and launch themselves on a life-affirming adventure.

Mary Worth, 1/20/10

Say, let’s check out what’s going on in Mary WoAAAUUUGGGH DAWN’S FACE HER TERRIBLE TERRIBLE FACE