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Dick Tracy, 8/13/09

OK, when I see “cutting” bandied about as a noun like this, I think immediately about people who self-harm. However, it’s obvious that Dick Tracy lacks the depression, self-doubt, vulnerability, and ability to feel emotional pain of any sort for that to be what he’s proposing; plus, he’s offering the suggestion with an unseemly amount of enthusiasm. Therefore, I can only assume that he’s actually planning to perform an impromptu autopsy on our poor dead trapeze artist, right there on the floor of the Big Top. “The sawdust will easily absorb the blood!”

Oh by the way, Dick, IT WAS THE CLOWN THAT DID IT. THE CLOWN WITH THE SOULFUL, SHIFTY EYES. HE KILLED HER. AND SENT THE NOTE. JUST FYI.

Mark Trail, 8/13/09

It’s now clear that we can’t refer to this gun-toting, orange-clad individual as an assassin, or even as a hit man, but nevertheless I’m beginning to really sort of be in awe of him. You have to respect the years of weapons training it must have taken for him to master the craft of not quite killing people. I wonder if every day he picks up his gun and shakes his head and thinks, “Thank goodness this rifle is in my capable hands. If you didn’t know what you were doing, you could really hurt someone with this!”

Crankshaft, 8/13/09

Since Cranksaft is, as near as I can tell, standing at floor level, I’m not sure whose perspective the first panel is supposed to be drawn from. One of the garden club ladies who drank too much gin and quietly slumped out of her front row seat onto the floor? The cheering throngs gathered in the public square to look up in adulation at their gardener-dictator giving a speech from a balcony, a scenario that frequently plays out in Crankshaft’s mind? Meanwhile, panel three is definitely one of the scariest things I’ve seen this week, and replicating or even approximating it in real life would probably loosen the tongues of everyone from the perps down at central booking to al Qaeda masterminds. “NO, NOT CRANKSHAFT! I’LL TELL YOU THE REAL ANSWER! JUST DON’T LET HIM NEAR ME!”

Ziggy, 8/13/09

If you’re going to be claiming ownership over sentient beings, Ziggy, perhaps you ought not to have acquired so many of them. You can wave paperwork around all you want, but why should you expect them to respect any system of law that perpetuates their enslavement? The grim expressions make it clear that a bloody revolt is in the offing, with each animal using its particular skills in the cause of their collective freedom. You don’t even want to know what that angry little fish is going to do to you.

(Psst! Interested in seeing a piece I did on various computers in various vehicles?)

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Pearls Before Swine, 8/12/09

Hello, anonymous rude denizens of the Internet! You have driven Stephan Pastis into his Internet Happy Box, so I hope you’re satisfied with yourselves. Actually, when people started emailing me about this strip this morning, I had a weird moment of déjà vu, as I thought this had run months ago. In fact, Stephan e-mailed it to me when he drew it, but that was back in April thanks to the high-tech distribution system that underlies the newspaper comics industry. Anyway, at the time I promised to rip him a new one when this came out, except he hasn’t been doing any of the terrible pun strips lately. SO UNTIL NEXT TIME PASTIS. You stay in that box just to be safe, though.

Baldo, 8/12/09

I went to college at Cornell, which is in the absolutely lovely (some might even say “gorges” HA IT’S A PUN GET IT) city of Ithaca, New York, which, despite being lovely, does not have much going for it in the way of malls. When you grow up going to Cheektowaga’s fabulous Walden Galleria, it’s a bit of a letdown doing all your enclosed chain-store shopping and food-court dining at the Pyramid Mall. This establishment appears to have since changed its name to “The Shops At Ithaca Mall,” which I find extremely amusing — oh, there are shops at the mall, you say? Anyway, I always used to mock the Pyramid Mall’s smallness by referring to it as the “Petite Mall”; I thought this was hilarious and everyone else was either more or less indifferent about it or thought it was actively offensive to people who have seizures. This is a roundabout way of saying that, why yes, I do feel validated by having essentially the same joke used in a Baldo strip 15 years later, thanks for asking!

I originally felt like there might be only about fifty-fifty chance that my terrible seizure joke was in fact the intended reading of this strip, but then I realized that there was no other obvious humor content here, so I figure that has to be what’s happening.

Hi and Lois, 8/12/09

It has not escaped my notice that quite a few of the recent Trixie-centered Hi and Lois strips have featured the pre-verbal infant girl wandering around outside apparently unattended. Maybe her parents are hoping that she’ll be adopted by a local wolfpack or some other band of animals and they’ll be relieved of responsibility for her; unfortunately, they hadn’t counted on the effectiveness with which the builders of their suburban subdivision cleared it of most wildlife. Trixie’s only option is to take up with a colony of frogs, which will go fine until she hits puberty and heads to the culvert under the arterial road with amplexus on her mind, only to be bitterly disappointed.

Hagar the Horrible, 8/12/09

Ha ha! He finds his wife’s mother so irritating that he’s going to hand her over to savages who will use her as a slave or a sacrifice to their pagan gods! MOTHERS IN LAW, am I right, people?

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Curtis, 8/11/09

Today’s Curtis is a truly epochal event! It’s not because Barry casually implies that Michelle is some kind of sinister pagan priestess, performing voodoo rituals in her lavishly appointed apartment. Ha ha, no, that’s just standard-issue Curtis madness. And it isn’t because we catch a rare glimpse of Curtis’s head without his hat perched upon it, though that’s always intriguing. (It is kind of amusing that he’s carefully combing it into place only to cover it up with his trademark chapeau for the next 23 hours.) No, what’s really important is that this is the probably the first newspaper comic in living memory in which the punchline (or, at least, the unsettling sentence occupying the space where the punchline would normally be) is being delivered by someone who’s urinating. Since I blessedly grew up an only child, I have to ask: did any of you ever wander into the bathroom and engage in banter with your sibling, and then one of you just stone cold started peeing? Because that’s … that’s gross. It’s gross if you did that.

Mary Worth, 8/11/09

“Yes, it’s true; my lectures, while inspiring and life-affirming, tend to attract the worst kind of perverts: relationship voyeurs. Always trying to overhear sincere conversations between two beloveds, getting their rocks off on emotional intimacy … YEAH, YOU IN THE GLASSES! YEAH, I SEE YOU! SICKO! I’M NOT SIGNING YOUR BOOK NOW!”

No, but seriously, I certainly hope that this blonde lady is either a snoopy reporter about to question Lawrence about his many monstrous crimes or carrying Lawrence’s love child. Because if we’ve got four days ahead of us of Lawrence and Delilah emoting weepily in Lawrence’s hotel room about the depth and majesty of their love, after all the promise this storyline had, I will be … not so much angry as just disappointed.