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Cathy, 4/13/08

I know it’s not “cool” to admit to being amused by Cathy, but I have to say that wading through all that text to get to the final word balloon was really worth it today. If the thought of Cathy reduced to such penury that she can only quench her thirst by desperately licking at her own salty, salty tears doesn’t bring a smile to your face, then you have a heart of stone, my friend.

Hi and Lois, 4/13/08

High on the list of Things I Have Spent Too Much Time Thinking About This Sunday: Why is Hi unshaven in this comic? Is this to represent the many hours he’s spent fretting over the family taxes? But in the opening panels, he’s clearly just getting started, but still sports a Don Johnson-esque stubble. Does it instead indicate that on weekends he takes a more relaxed attitude towards facial hair? But then, would he still put on a shirt and tie to do his taxes in his home office? I WANT ANSWERS DARN IT.

Further down on the list, but still nagging: “Tax Bat,” what the hell.

Slylock Fox, 4/13/08

The answer to this puzzle, if you can’t read it, involves Slylock swimming over to that overturned car and breathing the air out of the tires. This seems a little dubious to me, not least because he’ll have to engage in paw-to-tentacle combat with that octopus, which appears to be getting amorous with the submerged vehicle. My proposed solution? Just limit Max’s air intake. I’m sure that a little oxygen deprivation won’t do his already feeble brain any harm.

Meanwhile, that huge-eyed baby beaver will be haunting my dreams for weeks. The fact that it’s reproduced four times makes the top quarter of this comic more terrifying than Eraserhead.

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Dick Tracy, 4/12/08

Many have complained that Chief Liz has been relegated to the typical hapless female victim role in the current insane Dick Tracy storyline, despite being, you know, the actual chief of police. Today, she gamely tries her hand at Tracy-style crime fighting by attempting to actually rip the villain’s face off of the front of his skull. She is soon neutralized by a well-place elbow to the chin, but, hey, points for giving it a go.

The Phantom, 4/12/08

Liz needs to take some tips from our lady cop/waitress pair if she really wants to know how to take down a baddie, though: pump hot lead into him, then taunt him as he lies bleeding at your feet. The Ghost Who Only Hires Sadists has a slight smile, indicating that Kay and Hawa have at last passed the callousness threshold needed to enter the Jungle Patrol.

Family Circus, 4/12/08

“Didn’t they know you were a girl, and thus should only have been educated to the extent necessary for child-rearing and food preparation?”

And a couple of fun panels for you:

Panel from Spider-Man, 4/12/08

I wish we could get to see the proceedings of New York State Superior Court, Bribery Division, in which a jury will determine if Simon Krandis can, in fact, buy his way out of prison. Certainly it would be more interesting than the three weeks of Peter Parker whining and watching TV that we’re actually going to get.

Panel from Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/12/08

Among the small but very enthusiastic group holding a pretty specific fetish, today will go down in history as The Day June Morgan Ate A Cheeseburger With Her Big Sexy Teeth. Rex looks miffed that nobody wants to see a close-up of him pecking away at his spinach salad.

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The Phantom, 4/11/08

As was no doubt easily predictable, I lost interest in the current Phantom storyline rather quickly after all the hilarious Jungle Patrol! catchphrases petered out. (Not that you shouldn’t be stocking up on Jungle Patrol-themed merchandise, mind you.) Basically, our lady cop and waitress have been attempting to capture a notorious arms dealer in an attempt to prove their mettle to the male chauvinist pigs who run the Jungle Patrol; throughout the process, the Ghost Who Is Helpful has been surreptitiously doing much of the heavy lifting in the bad-guy-neutralization department. Some might think that this is unfair affirmative action on the Big Purple Guy’s part to try to get some ladies into his elite law-enforcement outfit, but since everyone in The Phantom other than the Phantom is generally pretty incompetent, I’m guessing that secret help from the Unknown Commander is par for the course on Jungle Patrol missions.

In today’s final panel, though, we learn that these ladies may be a little bloodthirsty even by Jungle Patrol standards. Sure, it’s reasonable for them to return fire, but it does seem like they were just waiting for the chance, doesn’t it? Usually the Phantom lets the baddies off with a little chin music and a Skull Mark™ as a reminder to stay on the straight and narrow, but our Swiss death merchant here looks like he’ll be as full of holes as his nation’s namesake cheese in short order.

Speaking of gunplay, while our lady cop has obviously been through weapons training, when did the waitress learn to fire off handgun rounds with such steely precision? I would have liked to have seen a Rocky-style montage sequence in which she learned the various deadly arts.

Shoe, 4/11/08

“That, plus the transceiver I attached to the bottom of your car in the parking lot, means that we’ll be seein’ a lot of each other! Haw haw!”

Since the earliest days of this blog, I have made it clear that I cannot abide the “sexy” lady birds in this strip. I dunno, there’s something about the combination of beaks and feathers with some distinctly, er, mammalian characteristics that just utterly squicks me out. The attention that’s been lavished on the glimpse we get of this barfly’s lower back isn’t helping me, either.

Spider-Man, 4/11/08

Hey, look, Simon Krandis keeps a fistful of wadded up bribe money in his tuxedo jacket at all times. The man would have made a swell governor!

The final panel is simultaneously the most hilarious and the most fetishistically unsettling image the Spider-Man newspaper strip has produced in the last three years.