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Family Circus, 4/5/09

This has got to be one of the most heartbreaking Family Circus cartoons I’ve ever seen. After spending all day (and all of her young womanhood) shut in with her litter of squallers, she’s suddenly confronted with the prospect of interacting with another adult — someone who wouldn’t want to spend time in a living room covered with cheap plastic crap and poorly-colored pictures, someone who she might even want to look nice for. Naturally, it turns out to be just another one of the little neighborhood urchins. At least he’s proposing to take Jeffy outside, so she can weep with abandon.

Beetle Bailey, 4/5/09

At long last, Beetle Bailey admits that American soldiers in training might be preparing to do something other than make stale jokes about alcoholism, sexual harassment, and fisticuffs! Still, one has to hope that the final panel — in which it is suggested that Castro’s long-standing paranoia about a U.S. invasion is true, that France’s Pacific possessions will be an invasion target as America gets involved in its first-ever war with a nuclear-armed opponent, and that American soil itself will soon find itself under military occupation and martial law — is as far removed from reality as this strip’s typical content.

Crock, 4/5/09

The throwaway strip that sits atop each Sunday’s Crock always features the strip’s title character’s name carved into a stone monument sitting majestically in the middle of the desert, like some kind of Ayers Rock-like monument to the French colonial empire; generally random characters wander around said Crock-rock making confusing references to the joke to follow. So I suppose I shouldn’t be unsettled by today’s edition, in which the great monolith seems to be muttering obscenities to itself — but I am, OK? I really am.

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Mary Worth, 4/4/09

I suppose this strip is supposed to be interesting because it contains one of Dr. Jeff’s occasional and doomed attempts to become a Man Of Action, but to be honest I’m much more interested in his trademark green jacket. Presumably he bought it years ago from a Masters Tournament winner in desperate need of cash (John Daly?), and now wears it at all formal events to show his contempt for bourgeois notions that clothes should be “attractive to look at” or “match.” Still, look at the way he’s carrying it around Mary’s apartment at arm’s length. It’s almost as if he finds wearing it any longer to be an exhausting prospect, but its totemic power is such that he’s afraid to set it down or turn his back on it. He particularly needs to be wary of laying it on Mary’s mustard-colored sofa, because the resulting color clash could rip a hole in the fabric of space-time itself.

(UPDATE: As faithful reader willethompson pointed out, John Daly never won the Masters; I blame confusingly worded Wikipedia infoboxes. For a non-golf-fan, the appeal of a cheap “drunk and desperate John Daly” joke was too strong to resist.)

Archie, 4/4/09

These three panels of Archie contain all the power of a Greek tragedy. A blind (or, in this case, bespectacled) sage notes the rot that is destroying his culture from the inside out, but is powerless to do anything but comment. Then, like poor doomed Pentheus, he is torn to bits by a mob of crazed women.

Family Circus, 4/4/09

Normally, when the Keane Kids mangle the English language and/or basic common sense to make one of the subpuns or moronic bits of wordplay that are this beloved feature’s stock in trade, they just stare ahead with blank, dumb expressions while doing so, as the gags’ accidental nature is supposedly part of their charm. In this panel, though, Billy and Jeffy seem to be amused by the former’s wisecrack. This could herald a dangerous new phase, in which the melonheads, having somehow become aware of the fact that they are being cut out of the newspaper and hung on the refrigerators of nice old ladies everywhere, ramp up their cloying cuteness to unbearable levels. On the other hand, it’s possible that they’re just amused by the prospect of eating their grandmother’s head.

Curtis, 4/4/09

One of this strip’s most common running gags involves Curtis asking his father for a cell phone, and his father informing him that cell phones are too expensive. Thus, I must conclude that the strip’s creator has no idea what text messages are. Perhaps he thinks they somehow involve a tennis racket.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/3/09

HEY EVERYONE JUNE MORGAN IS IN HER BIKINI! HOT! HUBBA HUBBA WOO HOO OK, look. Doubt my credentials as a heterosexual comic-loving man if you must, but I simply cannot get myself worked up over drawings of sexy ladies. I mean, sexy ladies are intriguing to me as a rule, but when it comes to cartoons, it’s hard for me to forget that someone, somewhere, generally a dude, was drawing said sexy lady, and usually thinking, “Hmm, I’ve seen sexy ladies in real life, but with the powers of my artistry, I can add even more sexiness!” Which in practice usually means “I can make her boobs even bigger!”

I don’t pretend to be consistent on this point. For instance, it’s well known that I have certain … feelings for Margo Magee. And Margo is nice enough to look at, but my feelings are primarily driven by the fact that she’s a hilarious, tightly-wound bag of angry crazy, which is the sort of thing I’ve been known to go for in the past. And while Margo’s wonderfully antisocial personality is as much a fictional construct as, say, Abbey Spencer’s ass crack, somehow it’s much harder for me to ignore the artifice involved in the construction of the latter.

And speaking of artifice … I’m not a professional breastologist or anything, but I’m pretty sure that one’s cleavage does not consist of two perfect and slightly separated semi-circles if one’s bosom is the one that God gave you. Having a surgically enhanced cartoon fantasy object strikes me as particularly bizarre and off-putting, to be sure, but what I really want to know is: whose work are we looking at here? Certainly not Rex’s; breast-enhancement surgery can take hours, and that’s much longer than he’d ever want to spend touching a girl’s boobies.

Blondie, 4/3/09

Blondie comments on the current economic crisis: the unemployed masses, their lives destroyed by the decisions of the powerful, weep openly in the street, just outside the fine restaurants where the captains of industry who got us into this mess dine on gourmet foods, served on china plates and fine tablecloths. The workers who are still employed sit by uncomfortably, afraid to protest at the injustice for fear of joining the starving hysterics in the gutter, wracked with shame over their collaboration in their own oppression.

Dennis the Menace, 4/3/09

Hey, Mr. Wilson, it’s the government that publicizes the names and addresses of sex offenders, not the television stations. But I admit that when they ran that picture of your house with the caption “PERVERTS IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD” as the lead story on the 6 o’clock news, that was a little much.

Pluggers, 4/3/09

You’re a plugger if you euphemistically refer to an anonymous sex party as “league bowling.” (The rest of us call it “book club.”)