Post Content

Family Circus, 4/26/09

Because I am admittedly a terrible person, the only Family Circuses I enjoy nonironically are those in which current artist Jeff Keane depicts his cartoonified childhood avatar Jeffy as being humiliated in some way, for psychological reasons one can only speculate about ghoulishly. The key to today’s strip is that young Jeffy is peppy and excited throughout the little episode portrayed; only grown-up Jeff seems to remember (or be tormented by) Daddy’s expression of disappointment and Billy’s expression of palpable disgust.

Mark Trail, 4/26/09

“If ash wood becomes unavailable, manufacturers are confident they can find a suitable substitute for making bats … like, say, aluminum! Boy, aluminum bats sure would help break some old batting records, wouldn’t they?”

Marvin, 4/26/09

“And yet they keep pumping me full of children’s Benadryl like it’s Kool-Aid! Why would they … but … so … sleepy … [ZZZZZZ]”

Post Content

Crock, 4/25/09

Some might call it inconsistent, but I like my terrible comic strips to keep track of and abide by their ossified, humorless conventions rather than trying to branch out into new comedic structures. Take, for instance, the frequent “Crock talks to his mother on the phone” trope in Crock. Usually we only hear our sinister commandant’s side of the conversation, with his mother’s replies relayed in indirect speech to whatever hapless forgettable character happens to have wandered into the panel. Today is the first time that I can remember actually seeing a word balloon (one so large that Crock has to hold the phone a good foot from his ear) emerging from Crock’s phone. Of course, the punchline is a hilarious reference to terrible institutional food causing an old woman to defecate uncontrollably, so I think we can provide the structural flexibility necessary to allow such a gem to be delivered.

Mary Worth, 4/25/09

“That’s right, Covice! Your nationwide string of broken hearts ends here, thanks the efforts of Bruno and Flaxhair, FraudCops! With the rust-colored jacket of justice and the minty blazer of retribution, they travel the nation, looking for scamsters with tell-tale pencil mustaches to put in the slammer. Sorry we took as long to catch up with him as we did, young lady; you didn’t do anything foolish like, say, give him an enormous sum of money, did you? Because you can pretty much kiss it goodbye if you did.”

Shoe, 4/25/09

The obvious punchline here is actually “Your body has a lot of hair.” I’d like to believe that the form actually used was chosen because it’s mildly funnier, but it may just be that someone finally remembered, apparently between the first and second panels, that the characters in Shoe are birds and thus have no hair at all.

Post Content

Funky Winkerbean, 4/24/09

“What? No, I’m not dying … of anything specific. It’s just … well, can’t you feel the hovering specter of death, floating around this town? Don’t you know deep in your bones that we’re all destined for an awful fate? Don’t you feel like at any minute we could be yanked off of this stage in a gruesome and arbitrary fashion, just on some unseen power’s whim? I know my life here is grim, but I still want to postpone that terrible moment for as long as possible.”

Apartment 3-G, 4/24/09

Obviously I would have preferred that Tommie had burned her attacker’s face off as I predicted rather than just giving him a seemingly harmless spritz up his nose. Still, this move may be smarter than it seems at first. After all, the currently red-headed Dr. Kelly was a blond in March and had brown hair in January. Obviously his current aggressive behavior is a result of his mind being taken over by a sinister alien parasite that’s taken over his brain; this creature has perched atop his head, for the most part assuming the appearance of human hair, but unable to maintain a consistent color due to quirks in its unearthly biology. The first step to defeating this monster is to immobilize it, as Tommie is doing with a generous application of generic hairspray.