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Family Circus, 6/13/18

I’m not sure who’s reactive facial expression in this panel I love more: Sam, striking a noble pose and working very hard to look like he can’t understand what Jeffy is talking about, that his position as morally superior to the other Keane dog, named “Barfy” for what I assume are obvious reasons, is still intact; or Mommy, cringing inside, worrying that Jeffy doesn’t need any sort of even vague hint that peeing on the floor is, in fact, an option.

Rhymes With Orange, 6/13/18

FUN FACT: did you know that even in the blessed afterlife, where we’ll spend eternity glorying in the close companionship of God, we will, eventually, grow bored with our existence, and seek new and ever more extreme ways to stimulate ourselves? And that without the prospect of bodily infirmity or death to create a natural end to this process, it can only escalate? Suddenly Lucifer’s rebellion against his Creator becomes easier to understand!

Spider-Man, 6/13/18

“–you need a refresher course in Spider-Man 101! First lesson: you’d think the whole point of spider-sense would be that it warns me about stuff when I’m not paying attention. But turns out nope! Turns out I have to be paying very close attention for it work. And if you’re thinking to yourself, ‘Wow, that’s pretty lame, and not really very impressive at all,’ well, wait till you hear about the rest of my whole deal!”

Pluggers, 6/13/18

You’re a plugger if you’ve had ten years, literally a decade, to figure out what the App Store is, but you just haven’t, and you have no plans to do so going forward, either.

Hi and Lois, 6/13/18

Ha ha, it’s funny because the baby has crippling anxiety that prevents her from experiencing uncomplicated happiness for more than a brief moment!

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Gil Thorp, 6/12/18

If there’s one thing Gil Thorp is committed to, it’s the lore, so yeah, I guarantee there was a Gil Thorp plot years back about a star baseball prospect who accidentally lost a finger or three to a grain thresher, and I’m devastated that I missed it. Mostly what I love here is how completely Kevin Pelwecki, a delusional quarterback wannabe who, thanks to obsessively watching YouTube videos, has turned out to be Actually Good at baseball, takes this information in stride. A baseball player with a mutilated hand? A football player who accidentally cut off his leg with a chainsaw? It’s all par for the course around the Milford athletic department!

Six Chix, 6/12/18

So, imagine you have a dog holding other dogs at gunpoint yelling “DROP THE BONES!” Would it be funny? No, not at all. Would you at least be able to parse what’s happening? Yes, for the most part. Now, imagine that the “gun” is drawn so that it might not be a gun, but it still looks kind of like one, and the gun(?)-weilding dog also makes a reference to an “app” of some sort. Would you be able to parse that? Not anymore! But would it be funny now? Not really! Anyway, you don’t have to imagine all this, because it just got printed across America, in several newspapers!

Shoe, 6/12/18

The Tip O’Neil-esque bird-senator in Shoe is named Batson Belfrey (it’s wordplay, get it????) and I guess the bat logo on the front of his podium is part of a personal branding effort. I’d like to imagine that today’s somewhat labored punchline is a result of a new Shoe intern being told to write dialogue for a pre-drawn strip without really being given any background, and they saw the bat and thought, “Well, is he … goth? I guess he’s a goth senator? And goths like the Addams Family, right?”

Hi and Lois, 6/12/18

The two garbage men looked at each other in mounting horror. Irma had worn them down over the period of months, with both carrots and sticks they wouldn’t talk about, even to each other, until they said they’d take her husband’s body to the dump. But when the agreed day arrived, it wasn’t what they had signed up for at all. He was still alive. But they were in too deep now. They had no choice.

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Slylock Fox, 6/11/18

Today’s Slylock has what strikes me as a pretty big disconnect between the text and the art. The narrative we’re presented with asks us to believe that it’s Max who was lagging behind, and Slylock who has to still forge ahead to complete their mission. But check out what they actually look like: Max dynamically striding forward into adventure, looking over his shoulder at his companion, who’s desperately clinging to the broken bridge with a look of panic on his face. It’s almost as if these tales aren’t being written by their true hero, isn’t it? Anyway, here’s hoping Max crumples that map into a ball, tosses it into the ravine while Slylock watches, and heads off into the jungle, never looking back.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/11/18

While I admit it isn’t for everyone, I really enjoyed the Darren Aronofsky Noah from a few years back (my pocket review is that the it’s the only big-budget biblical epic I’ve seen that has the nerve to get as crazy as the actual bible). One of the key themes of the movie is that for most of the story Noah believes that God plans to kill off all of mankind for its sins; Noah and his family are merely to shepherd the animal species through the Flood, and then once they die of old age, the human race will be justly wiped out. It’s only when he discovers that his daughter-in-law is pregnant that he has to recalibrate his thinking; but what today’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith asks us to imagine is a word where the Flood is meant as a final and complete act of extermination, not just for man but for the beasts as well. Parson Tuttle is, as usual, wrong: There is an ark, and these creatures are calmly walking one by one into it, each to bear witnes for his or her kind at the complete elimination of all their fellows. All will live out the rest of their lives in contemplation, and eventually perish, leaving the earth cleansed of the filth that is biological life.

Mary Worth, 6/11/18

Hey, remember when Tommy used to date one his co-workers, but then he hurt himself and missed a few days of work, and when he came back she dumped him and he became a Vicodin addict? Then he eventually got fired, which solved the problem of having to work with an ex, but caused more problems in terms of not having a job and spiraling downward into addiction and so forth. But good news! Now he has a job, and there’s a girl at this job that Tommy clearly intends to make his own! His life’s all set, until the dangerous combination of a back injury and a breakup inevitably befalls him again.

Spider-Man, 6/11/18

It’s funny because Iron Fist has immediately taken Spidey’s measure and deemed him not even worth punching with his titular iron fist, and instead has chosen to kick him with what I assume is a regular, non-metallic foot, which appears to be clad in a ballet slipper of some kind.