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Marmaduke, 6/1/09

I suppose that Marmaduke’s owner’s wobbly, knock-kneed stance and one-sided smirk are supposed to convey “coquettish feigned innocence,” and that we are meant to understand that she has left her tired old penny loafers out in the middle of the floor, possibly after having covered them with steak sauce, so that Marmaduke will eat them and she’ll get to buy exciting new penny loafers. This is all well and good, but harnessing Marmaduke’s insatiable appetite for organic or quasi-organic matter to solve one’s problems can lead down a dangerous path. I shudder to imagine the scene, a few months hence, when Marmaduke’s owner arrives home to find the mangled corpses of her children strewn across the foyer. “Oh no!” she’ll exclaim. “Now I’ll have to figure out something fun to do with the money in their college savings accounts!”

Family Circus, 6/1/09

I actually find this cartoon kind of poignant, mostly because of what you can barely see written on the paper: “Chapt 1 I’m bored.” Is this some sort of creative writing assignment, where the students are allowed to write their own novels, their stories limited only by their imagination? Has the task brought Billy face to face with his essential emptiness, a fundamental lack of creative energy? Is he bored inside his own head? His enormous, misshapen head?

Hi and Lois, 6/1/09

I was going to make a crack here about the Flagstons’ depressing, sexless marriage, but then I remembered how awful it was when they last telegraphed to us their intentions to get freaky, so: yes, this is exactly how I expect — nay, require — Hi and Lois to spend their precious few hours of alone time.

Slylock Fox, 6/1/09

Really, Sly? Industrial espionage? That … that just seems beneath you.

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Apartment 3-G, 5/31/09

Last week saw possibly the most momentous event that can ever happen in Apartment 3-G — a proposal of marriage! Yet the strip was almost entirely absent from this site, because it was Gary proposing to Tommie and … ZZZZZZ … oh, I’m sorry, that sentence was so boring I couldn’t even finish typing it without dozing off. And yet with just two hilarious sentences — “You can’t get married and move to Denver! You don’t even ski!” — Margo makes me glad that I read the strip this week, just so I could appreciate the set-up. Yes, Margo makes the Tommie-Gary storyline sort of worthwhile. SHE HAS SUPER POWERS.

Funky Winkerbean, 5/31/09

“Ha ha! Seriously, though, thanks for the history lesson and all, but do you mind leaving me alone so I can finish jerking off to this comic book in peace? I promise to put it back on the rack when I’m done.”

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Spider-Man, 5/30/09

There are so many Spider-Man newspaper strip tropes that irritate me — “Peter Parker whines because Mary Jane makes more money than he does,” “Peter Parker yells at the TV,” “Peter Parker forgets to bring his Spidey costume somewhere he needs it,” “Peter Parker forgets that he has his costume under his clothes and then needs to take his clothes off, for some reason” — but perhaps the most irritating is “Some ancillary character about whom you don’t care suspects that Peter Parker is Spider-Man.” The latest version of this has taken up much of the last week, as Peter was subject to some desultory hallway questioning about his late-night habits from an old lady in his apartment building; rather than making up some plausible explanation (which, I’d like to emphasize, would be remarkably easy to do for anyone with two brain cells to rub together), instead he panicked and refused to enter an elevator with his elderly neighbor, knowing that he’d break and confess everything under the harsh glow of the florescent lights, and fled down the stairs instead.

Normally I’d have passed over this entire episode in disgusted silence, but I note with some amusement that, according to the reliably entertaining Spider-Man narration box, we were supposed to have regarded this sad farce as “fun time.” Now, however, we’re getting to the deadly serious meat of the story, in which a sinister gang of chinbearded druids prepares for their next daring tractor-trailer heist.

Beetle Bailey, 5/30/09

I’m not sure why, exactly, but I find this Beetle Bailey particularly insulting. Look, General Halftrack is hunched over with rage and he’s pouring booze down his throat, OK? And his wife is falling all over herself apologizing for planning some sort of basic interaction with other humans. The General doesn’t want to go. We get it. You don’t have to name them “the Borrings” to emphasize that General Halftrack will, in fact, be bored (borred?) when he has dinner with them. I never thought I’d hold up Blondie as some sort of paragon of efficient, naturalistic narrative in sequential art storytelling, but, well, Blondie managed to pull this off without giving the off-screen hateful family a name that telegraphed their function. (They ended up with a delightfully insane name, the Glamrockers, but that’s another story.)

Oh, also: General Halftrack is a desperate alcoholic who needs to be drunk in order to function socially, ha ha!