The Comics Curmudgeon

One-panel one-liners

Heathcliff, 1/12/13

Heathcliff enjoys eating actual putrefying garbage, much to the disgust of humans.

Lockhorns, 1/12/13

As Leroy is all too well aware, the Lockhorns’ friends are prepared to unleash a hail of bullets on both of them with very little provocation.

Pluggers, 1/12/13

WHAAAT A PLUGGER DRIVING A FOREIGN CAR BUILT BY ACTUAL COMMUNISTS HERESY UNCLEAN

Metapost: COTWavaganza

Would you like this week’s top comment? I imagine you would!

“Sorry, folks, but when Mary Worth says ‘cocoa’ she doesn’t mean sex. She of course means a drab, tepid, beige beverage which tastes nothing like cocoa.” –Digger

And the runners up! Very funny!

“I hope the rest of the week consists of the Parker clan sitting around the table marveling at the size of the check. On Saturday, the Revolution starts and the Parkers are the first ones guillotined.” –Calvin’s Cardboard Box

“Even with a rifle pointed at him, Mark remained calm. The monkey was close, in the trees. He spread his consciousness out to the nearby animals. There was a salt-water crocodile nearby; Mark touched its primitive reptile brain and brought it closer, just in case the monkey failed. But that wouldn’t happen. He saw Juan through faceted eyes of a hundred mosquitos. Distraction, if he needed it. And he saw Juan out of the monkey’s eyes, smelled the fear on the man with the monkey’s nose. Nature, red in tooth and claw, took a deep breath. And pounced.” –Voshkod

“The rack zoom on Jeff’s dissociative episode in panel 2 really highlights the non-Euclidean geometry of the car. I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s strip, in which Jeff slams on the brakes, garroting Mary with the seatbelt that’s apparently stretched over her jugular, and the Eschermobile tumbles out of the two-dimensional confines of the comic and into Marmaduke.” –Nate

“Mark Trail: There is nothing quite like wrapping up and recapping a bizarre and idiotic series of events, while making empty promises of ‘stories,’ over a great lunch of mustard straight from the jar.” –Marc

“Awww snap! This is the moment all of us Anne Eiffell/TJ ’shippers have been waiting for! No, it’s not, there’s no such thing.” –OMEGA SUPREME

“In fact, Evans, why don’t you stop drawing your female characters in cat-fights and dedicate you spare time to depictions of an unhappy TJ. You know, TJ dropping his ice-cream cone, TJ missing the bus in a rainstorm, TJ in the waiting room at the VD clinic. I WILL PAY YOU GOOD MONEY TO SEE THESE!” –pugfuggly

“I hope Sherry has good health insurance. She has probably acquired at least a dozen kinds of exotic Kraven-pelt parasites by now, apart from the lung damage caused by Kraven’s very special brand of B.O.” –Poteet

“Teacher says every time a bell rings, Margo houses down some more Goldschläger.” –Doctor Handsome

“Yep, Jeff’s black, orange and pink auto color scheme makes perfect sense.” –Doodle Bean

Thanks to everyone who put some scratch in my tip jar! To find out more about how you could be thanked in this spot, and more about sponsoring this site’s RSS feed, click here.

Comics prudery whiplash

Momma, 1/11/13

Francis broke this copying machine with his ass, right? Like, he was making photocopies of his ass, and then he broke the copy machine, with his ass? Look, he’s even tenderly resting his hands on his ass-injury! This is how people break copy machines in jokes, and yet the neo-Victorians who run the comics pages refuse to let us laugh at the image of Francis panicking as his naked ass shatters the glass on the office copy machine.

Mary Worth, 1/11/13

And yet they print depraved sexual filth like this in the newspapers where the children can see! Won’t somebody think of the children, for once?

In search of lost eternal time

Beetle Bailey, 1/10/13

Every long-running comic strip that isn’t Gasoline Alley, Doonesbury, or pre-time-freeze For Better or For Worse has a problem: its characters remain the same age, more or less, but it tries to keep cultural references current, which means that everyone’s personal chronology is unmoored from the universal progression of time. What is their strange existence like? Today’s Beetle Bailey provides a horrifying insight. Everything that’s ever happened to the damned inhabitants of Camp Swampy over the last 50 years of our time — every terrible pun, every downed shot, every golf game, every act of egregious sexual harassment, every long march, every horrible meal, every vicious beating — has taken place over the course of a single, eternally long day. Time cannot heal the physical and psychic wounds its characters suffer, because time simply does not pass for them. This strip is more harrowing than I ever imagined.

Luann, 1/10/13

We interrupt my longrunning and deliberate policy of ignoring Luann to bring you today’s incredibly disappointing Luann. Yeah, TJ and Anne Eiffel made out, for, like, a second, before TJ stormed off in a high dudgeon, proving that TJ was never as hilarious and unmoored as he seemed. He was apparently just dicking around at Weenie World, recording Anne saying mean things and being extremely low-level unethical, because he was bored and wanted to get her fired, but he was never really committed to the idea. Because you know who could really ruin Anne’s life, TJ? Her boyfriend, that’s who! What’s the matter, aren’t you serious about this? Aren’t you willing to sacrifice? What are you, chicken?

Spider-Man, 1/10/13

So, to review: Spider-Man tried to save a lady who was falling off an elephant, but then he got kicked unconscious by the elephant instead, and the lady was rescued by the ostensible villain. THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN!

Apartment 3-G, 1/10/13

Sure you want to leave, Ari? It appears that Margo and Greg have reached the “We will use literally any pretext to get drunker” stage of evening.

Why the Norse conquered England

Funky Winkerbean, 1/9/13

As threatened, Crazy Harry is about to do some kind of emotionally scarring sybaritic dance, probably while naked. He’s already basically making sweet love to that comics anthology, right in plain sight of everybody. John, powerless to stop his employee, is desperately trying to minimized the damage. “Can’t let the children see,” he thinks. “We’ll be shut down for sure if any of the children see.”

Hagar the Horrible, 1/9/13

All simple sheep-herding peasants who tend flocks on pastureland within a day’s march of the coast of the North Sea: prepare to have your livestock raided, your family killed, and your village burned to the ground.

Dennis the Menace, 1/9/13

“Plus she’s really, really skinny. Why does she talk about dieting all the time? Sometimes I worry that she has an eating disorder!”

Fight! Fight! Fight for Mary’s looooove!

Mary Worth, 1/8/13

Oh my God, has this Mary Worth cake design contest plot secretly been a Mary Worth Dr. Jeff gets jealous plot all along? Have I been extra good this year, to be rewarded so handsomely?

For those of you who are relatively new to Mary Worth fandom, the last Dr. Jeff jealousy storyline was pretty delightful. While volunteering at the hospital, Mary met a pair of brothers who were feuding even at their mothers deathbed. Then Mary picked up one of the dudes right at his mom’s funeral (under the guise of helping him with his grief or whatever), and they went on a date where he boasted about his political power — with Mary having broken a date with Jeff to do so. Somehow they made it into the local paper’s gossip pages, which left Dr. Jeff angry and humiliated, and they broke up, for a like a minute, but then Jeff repented and stated leaving pathetic, begging messages on Mary’s answering machine. But wait! It turns out the new beau hated seafood, which was a huge deal-breaker, so that relationship ended a little too amicably later that week. Mary and Jeff eventually reunited, bandying about unsettlingly erotic metaphors.

Since then it’s been smooth sailing, but now the green monster of jealousy is rearing its ugly head again! Poor Jeff just spent all that money on a semi-convincing blond dye job in order to look more youthful and vigorous, and this is how he’s repaid?

Apartment 3-G, 1/8/13

Meanwhile, Margo’s Christmas adventure just keeps getting more entertaining! I think at one point she and Greg were going to see Professor Ari working in a soup kitchen in a Santa outfit, but they wisely decided to stay in and make out instead. So Santa’s come to them! And he’s ready to get ripped.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/8/13

The Smif Menfolk Fambly Reunion is just day after day of unceasing violence. Just Smifs beating the crap out of each other in the streets, in houses, in Smif Fighting Pits with greased walls. The women can only cower indoors and pray, and prepare to tend to the survivors.