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Gil Thorp, 3/28/09

“Hey, Josh,” you’re probably wondering, “How did the winter Gil Thorp story finally play out?” Well, Gil managed to convince the Larkins (who are black) that it would be racist to move back to New York City to take a lucrative job that would help Mr. Larkin get his career back on track, and take the family away from the awful town where the kids are dating juvenile delinquents! Brenda Larkin marked the permanence of her presence in Loserville, USA, by blowing a key shot in the big game, thus keeping the Lady Mudlarks out of the playdowns, again. (The boys’ team’s fate wasn’t even discussed, so presumably they weren’t even in contention.) Then a career criminal, Ted Ex Machina, confessed to the convenience store hold-up that put all this in motion. And today, the one bit of whimsy and joy this plotline has given us — the fact that Ashley got robbed of a case of Nutboys (“It’s Nutty!”) — has been retroactively erased in Orwellian fashion. THEY WERE NUTBOYS, DO YOU HEAR ME? NOT ZAGNUTS! NUTBOYS! Now, for the love of all that’s vaguely wacky, let’s move on to baseball season.

In the final panel, we have confirmed what we’ve known all along: that Milford is a sort of Jerusalem for everyone who’s given up on doing anything with their lives.

Family Circus, 3/29/09

I’m not sure what’s sadder: that the Keanes view representational art as sacrilegious, and thus only decorate their otherwise blank walls with exuberance-restricting commands in terrifying blackletter font, or that said commands are so routinely disobeyed in the Keane Kompound, which is best known for the sounds of morons shrieking malapropisms.

Luann, 3/29/09

“You’ll be making crepes for me. While I wait in bed. Your bed. Which is where I’ll sleep, after I’ve captured and subdued you with my muscular, prehensile head-tail. Even now, it’s curling and uncurling at the tip, in eager anticipation of the moment when it will strike and wrap around you with its anaconda-like strength.”

Apartment 3-G, 3/29/09

“Aunt Carol thinks that being a child of divorce, like pretty much half of everybody in America today, and having a father with a lucrative medical career is the equivalent of growing up in a squalid refugee camp in the middle of a war zone! Aunt Carol has absolutely no God-damned sense of proportion.”

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Mark Trail, 3/27/09

Our two cons are clearly taking the wrong tack here, as it’s fairly obvious that Rusty has no idea what money is. In that third panel, it looks as if his initial desire upon seeing a big wad of cash is to eat it.

Marvin, 3/27/09

“Plus, we agreed that we could never risk creating another horror equal to Marvin. That’s why we had you castrated.”

Ziggy, 3/27/09

At last, someone has grown so disgusted with Ziggy’s pantsless, self-loathing antics that they’ve decided to poison him.

Apartment 3-G, 3/27/09

“Well, if he doesn’t want his colon to ‘jam’ up, he should try some Health Flakes™! They’re nutritious and palatable!”

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Funky Winkerbean, 3/26/09

You know, I’ve gotten into a nice little groove here on this blog, but sometimes I have a crisis of faith. I wonder if my analysis gets more repetitive than the material warrants. Are the running jokes (which have their own section in this site’s Wikipedia entry!) getting overdone? Should I stop pointing out that Herb and Jamaal is ludicrously non-specific, that Marmaduke is a terrifying, all-devouring demon-thing, and that Funky Winkerbean is a black hole of bleakness and depression and cancer from which no joy or laughter can escape?

Then along come strips like this to reaffirm my central mission. For those of you not in the know, elevated PSA levels could indicate prostate cancer, and that biopsy will probably involve a scalpel in close proximity to Funky’s junk. This, naturally, is the only result that you can reasonably expect when you dare to beg God for relief from your ceaseless troubles. If there’s any consolation, it’s that Funky is a much less likable character than the last one who died of cancer here, and the strip’s admirable commitment to authenticity means that he’ll just get angrier and less pleasant as his slow march to death continues.

The dude sitting in a wheelchair a foot away from a TV blaring out grim economic news is really the strip’s pièce de résistance. Because there was a chance that you might read this and think “Hey, I don’t have cancer”; obviously you need to be reminded that you’ll soon be warming your hands over a trash-can fire and eating beans out of a can, probably after having become wheelchair-bound in an unrelated incident.

Dick Tracy, 3/26/09

It’s a sad day when America’s greatest comic-strip detective starts borrowing plot themes from Mary Worth, but the difference in how the two strips handle these identity theft storylines ought to be instructive. When Mary tackled it, we saw a lot of weeping and panic and forgiveness and easy-to-follow instructions from helpful experts. Dick Tracy’s take will no doubt involve weeping and panic as well, but a lot more broken bones and flayed skin, and definitely no forgiveness.

Mary Worth, 3/26/09

“Yes, the donation will be the last thing he’ll be thinking of … ever, once my plan to poison him is completed! MOO HA HA HA! Oh, wait, did I just say that part aloud?”