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Crankshaft, 1/4/08

Hey! Remember yesterday, when I said that Crankshaft combined Family Circus-esque “funny” wordplay and soul-searing bleakness? Well sometimes, they don’t even bother with the puns! Sometimes it’s just an angry, lonely old man contemplating his own impending death. Whee!

Mark Trail, 1/4/07

I love that Mark is totally baffled by Luke’s motivations here. “Why would anyone break the law just to spend more time hanging out with a girl? Do you think he put his thingy in her hoo-hoo? Yuck! Luke should get married like me. Then nobody thinks you’re weird but you never have to spend any time with girls ever!”

Apartment 3-G, 1/4/08

Watch out, Eric! When the four different voices in Margo’s head all say the same thing, it means nothing but trouble.

One Big Happy, 1/4/08

Ah, my favorite kind of One Big Happy: The kind where Joe realizes that his smug satisfaction in his own ignorance is only going to be cute for another year or two, and decides to milk it for all it’s worth.

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Apartment 3-G, 1/3/08

The submissive dialog in panel one of this strip seems to indicate that Eric has at last perfected his greatest creation: the Margo-bot 4000, an automaton with all of the external characteristics of a Margo but none of the sass or lip. Why one would want a Margo with no sass or lip is, of course, a puzzle, which may explain why the sexy cyberfemale is already starting in with the backtalk by panel three; surely the Margo-bot would be programmed to at least simulate the real thing’s essential hostility. Presumably the Margo-bot, imbued with these fundamentally conflicting impulses, will, like 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL, eventually go on a killing rampage, probably joined in the bloodbath by the actual Margo.

Crankshaft, 1/3/08

You know, Crankshaft often consists of this sort of sub-cute Family Circus-style punnery. But unlike the grinning morons of the Family Circus, the Crankshafters usually look angry or upset as they deliver their little verbal jests, today’s panel three being a prime example. “Just as annoying as the Family Circus, but so much grimmer”: That was the Crankshaft elevator pitch right there. I can’t deny that I too would have given it the green light.

Pluggers, 1/3/08

There are two little words I find confusing in today’s Pluggers, and they are “-in” and “-law”. Why wouldn’t this have worked just as well with the dog-man’s son (or daughter, for that matter) being the newly minted pentuagenarian? Is the joke perhaps that the son-in-law is significantly older than the daughter? Are you a plugger if you married off your 15-year-old daughter to one of your peers to consolidate both families’ land holdings?

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Curtis, 1/2/08

The Curtis annual Kwayzee Kwanzaa digression never disappoints. Never. This year, we have the tale of a master thief, who stole a water buffalo’s hide while she was bathing (did you know that water buffalos are people inside their hides? It’s true!), then married and impregnated her, only to earn the wrath of a two-headed poisonous snake by stealing its eggs. Really! And now the snake has done something awful to the buffalo lady, probably changed her unborn buffalo-human hybrid baby into some kind of three-way buffalo-human-two-headed-snake hybrid, and a valuable lesson will be learned, namely: don’t do mescaline, kids. I hate to say it, but the whole thing make Hanukkah look kind of boring. Did the Maccabees ever transform into animals, or marry animals, or anything? Can we get a deuterocanonical rewrite here?

Gil Thorp, 1/2/08

We saw last week that Andrew is exactly the sort of quick-witted sharpie who might actually recognize a double-entendre like “We’re not huge — but you don’t have to be if you’re talented” when he sees it, and might enjoy trying to slip it past an obviously hungover Marty Moon. We’ll be looking forward to hearing more ribald quips from this hatchet-faced wunderkind once he starts talking about “the Bucket.”

Marvin, 1/2/08

His medicine cabinet … and his bloodstream. Those heavy lids and eyebags indicate that Grandpa has been so doped up by the pharmaceutical-industrial complex that he can barely stand up straight. The saddest thing is that this strip is taking place at two in the afternoon, and he’s just managed to lift his head off of his drool-soaked pillow long enough to shamble into the bathroom and get another fix.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 1/2/08

If my record-keeping is on track, then “Bob Bennett” is actually faithful reader benro, who apparently goes to a doctor’s office frequented by vomiting fetishists. Bonus Scadutoism: “Woopee”.