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Apartment 3-G, 2/4/08

For the uninitiated, panels two and three are a good introduction to our gal Magee, revealing her to be a lovely and charming combination of Hermann Göring and P.T. Barnum. I wasn’t even aware that Lu Ann had shared her deranged oxygen-deprived series of hallucinations (or were they hallucinations? DUN DUN DUNNNHHHH) with her roommates, but assuming she did, it’s not at all surprising that Margo would chose to use that knowledge to publicly humiliate her for financial gain. The great thing about exploiting Lu Ann is that she was already kind of dumb even before the carbon monoxide poisoning played hell with her memory, so Margo can just claim that she’d already signed off on this publicity campaign months ago and she’ll probably buy it.

For Better Or For Worse, 2/4/08

THE FACE, MEREDITH, GO FOR THE FACE! I love how quickly Mike has given up hope of stopping his progeny from battling it out with razor-sharp kitchen utensils; now he seeks merely to level the playing field. I’ll give this to him, though: just one afternoon where one of his kids blinds the other one and he’ll never be left in charge of them by himself again.

Marmaduke, 2/4/08

I have to admit that I had always assumed that, when Marmaduke finally mastered the English language, he’d be a lot more threatening in his use of it. For instance, I’d have imagined that what he’d have written in the snow here would have been more along the lines of “YOU HAVE TO COME OUT SOMETIME AND WHEN YOU DO YOU’RE MINE.”

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Family Circus, 2/3/08

Hmm, Billy, maybe that’s what they teach you in your liberal secular humanist public school, but I have someone here who’d beg to differ. A little someone named Genesis 1:26-7:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

So you see, Billy, there was none of this blasphemous decision-making process that you envision, as God simply copied His own preexisting Face for mankind. And He certainly didn’t request any help from the peanut gallery as you appear to be doing, either. As to where exactly God got His Face from, or as to what need he Has for a human-type Face, exactly, those are the sorts of questions that would get you a good paddling if you were going to the sort of school that made this country great.

Slylock Fox, 2/3/08

After Pearls Before Swine borrowed the Slylock Fox formula a few weeks ago, we should have expected that the PBS gang would make a reciprocal appearance before too long. Followers of Rat and Pig’s adventures probably don’t need any fancy process of ratiocination to figure out just who slammed a tree limb into the back of an innocent bunny’s head for not good reason. More disturbing to me is the Six Differences, where a hungry rabbit has hollowed out a snowman from the inside and is now triumphantly holding his noggin aloft à la the Headless Horseman. Our towheaded youth will be describing this scene to his therapist for years to come.

Judge Parker, 2/3/08

“Sure, let’s have an impromptu lunch date! It’s not like my dying mother isn’t going to still be dying in a few more hours; plus, the longer you linger with me, the better sense I get of how little effort will be expected of me when I actually start working with you!”

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Marmaduke, 2/2/08

In the aftermath of the assassination of Julius Caesar, the great orator Cicero became the most important figure in the Roman Senate; after a brief period of political truce, he began a series of increasingly bitter public speeches against Marc Antony, Caesar’s political heir. While these speeches — the so-called Philippics — are regarded as masterpieces of oratory, they also goaded Antony so much that the fragile political peace that held in Rome collapsed; in the ensuing brief but nasty civil war, Cicero was captured and killed by one of Antony’s soldiers. His severed head and hands were displayed in the Roman forum, but legend has it that first Antony’s wife Fulvia berated his head and pricked his tongue with needles as revenge against the invective he had hurled against her husband.

This is a roundabout way of wondering why the hell we can see Marmaduke’s owner’s legs under the table but not Marmaduke’s. My guess is that the family has finally risen up against the tyrannical monster that has ruled their life for so long, and that the matriarch can now say everything she ever wanted to say while he was alive to his enormous, lifeless, detached skull.

Shoe, 2/2/08

I’m guessing Skyler is less than keen to hear about the young, vigorous body you once had, Perfesser. In fact, seeing as I’ve always pegged him as being somewhere in the 10 to 13 range, he probably is less than keen to get bedtime stories from you at all. However old he is, it’s good to see in panel three that he’s already mastered that heavy lidded, life-has-crushed me look that his uncle presents so regularly.

Since we only hear the beginning of this story, the mystery of what happened to Cosmo’s 28-inch waist will probably remain ever mysterious; I wonder if his reluctance to get out of his chair and actually walk to the child’s bedside to read his bedtime story is contributing factor to the loss of his slender middle or a result of the same.

Wizard of Id, 2/2/08

Earlier this week, the Wizard of Id did a particularly egregious variation on its long-running “torture is hilarious” theme, but for some reason I found that less troubling than this strip, in which it’s posited that the best way to end poverty is to physically assault poor people. We can see the unconscious (or possibly lifeless) body of the medieval hobo in the background of panel three, so obviously our brave hero hasn’t taken things to the logical conclusion and eaten him.

Luann, 2/2/08

Well, sure, dad, but you could be terrified and then crushed, which could cause permanent paralysis. Honestly, this is basic first aid that Brad should have learned in his fireman’s training.