Pearls Before Swine: JEFFY, fat and tattooed, sits on death row receiving last rites.

Not even Jeffy can outrun the law forever, I suppose.

Pearls Before Swine: What do you do when you have a moral dilemma?

Moral compasses are often glitchy, actually.

Pearls Before Swine: I'm thinking about running for the senate...I want to make a difference.

True story: I plan on running for public office next year. I think this blog and the anal rape joke I just made will really help my chances.

Pearls Before Swine and xkcd: Personally, I find atheists just as annoying as fundamentalist Christians.

These comics have nothing to do with each other, except that they're sharing Best Comic of the Day honors today. Pearls is really good at playing with the way comics are constructed and using space other cartoons never use. xkcd, meanwhile, is really good at observing the things people say and then making them feel stupid for saying them.*

*And when I say "people," I mean "me."

Pearls Before Swine: What happened here?

One of my favorite things about Pearls Before Swine (and I have many favorite things about Pearls Before Swine) is the matter-of-fact way it deals with death. It doesn't trivialize death; rather it simply acknowledges death's always looming presence. And, of course, when all your characters are animals who would ostensibly be eating one another, death becomes an even more omnipresent threat than in the real world.

Pearls Before Swine: Dear life...

The tag I have here is "Melancholy," but this comic may cross that threshold and become something else entirely. Regardless, my favorite part may be the tacked-on nature of the punchline, which is funny only insomuch as it provides relief from the relentless darkness that came before.

Pearls Before Swine: I, Rat, have figured out that the key to happiness is to lower your expectations. So I have created the "Expectation Crusher."

I desperately need this machine.

Family Circus: Who threw sunflower seeds all over this floor?

In the event that you are confused by the "Not me!" gremlin, Wikipedia is here to provide you with all the information you need. The information will not, however, make it any less horrifying.

And given that we now know Jeffy to be tormented by his parents, other comic strip characters and gremlins, a demon hand and lycanthropy seem all the more plausible, and his murderous yearning all the more understandable.

Pearls Before Swine: I'm afraid one of my characters, "Jeffy," keeps getting hit in the nose with sunflower seeds.

Here we see yet another possible source for Jeffy's violent outbursts.

Pearls Before Swine: Ping!

And so it turns out that I am pretty much Rat. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Pearls Before Swine: AAAHHHHH

We here at The Comics Section appreciate just this sort of sophisticated humor.

Herb & Jamaal and Pearls Before Swine: This strip just gets stranger and stranger.

These comics each use pretty much the same gag, in which a mundane phrase becomes absurdly literal for comic effect. But the Pearls is quite a bit funnier, partially because the specific situation is more extreme, partially because Pig is just a funnier character than the tall one in Herb & Jamaal and partially because of the extra layer of meta in the final Pearls panel.

*Herb & Jamaal from 3-6-10.

Pearls Before Swine: Well now gosh dern dadburn it!!

If Pastis wanted to repeat this comic with a different annoying character getting an arrow through the chest every week, I'd probably be OK with that.

Pearls Before Swine: My father-in-law died.

Yet another touching Sunday comic, from perhaps an even more unlikely source.

Ziggy and Pearls Before Swine: Ziggy, it seems we've been recieving complaints from the other comic strips about your lack of pants!

I mock Ziggy a lot here, largely because it's terrible in almost every conceivable way. On the other hand, my taste runs more toward Pearls Before Swine, with its caustic, cynical satire. So I'm really not at all in Ziggy's target demographic, which I presume is composed almost entirely of greeting card executives and old ladies who collect fairy figurines. And, you know, they have different standards than me. That said, I still think Ziggy sucks as a piece of art, but it is undeniably a very successful product, and I blame Tom Wilson not one whit for making the most of it.

The other point I want to make is that even though cartoonists like Wilson make crappy comics, they're still probably pretty funny people. I base this on the theory that you can't make it in a funny business without being a funny person, even if the product you end up producing turns out to be not all that funny. This is to say, I'm pretty sure that if I went out to lunch with Tom Wilson or Jeff Keane, they would prove to be pretty witty conversationalists.* So it never surprises me to see the sort of thing we find in today's comics section, in which Wilson appears to take all of Stephan Pastis' ribbing in good fun.***

*Until they murdered me in cold blood, of course.**

**Ha ha! I'm just kidding! They have wonderful senses of humor! They would find my blog delightful!

***Pastis actually writes about this here and here.

Pearls Before Swine: This is not "Twitter."

Et tu, Pastis? Et tu?

Pearls Before Swine: You been reading your strips lately?

I've not been a huge fan of Pearls' recent descent into Lewis Carroll-inspired surrealism, but anything that ends with Jeffy Keane getting eaten by giant caterpillar thing can't be all bad.

Pearls Before Swine: Hey, buy me the moped. I'll drive it off a cliff.

There is an undercurrent of misanthropy that runs through pretty much the entire comics section, but nearly all comics pretend that it isn't there. If this blog has a mission, beyond killing time, it's to uncover that misanthropy. And that's basically Pearls Before Swine's mission, too. This is both what makes Pearls such a great strip and why I like it so much.

Also, a suicidal monkey! It's funny!

Pearls Before Swine and Ziggy: What the fuck, Zig?

Rat's is a perfectly acceptable response to virtually any Ziggy cartoon, including today's.

Pearls Before Swine: Hullo. Dis Pressydent of Uniteed State.

Next time on Lou Dobbs Tonight: Is the president a crocodile? If not, why won't he provide proof to refute claims that he was born in a swamp in the Everglades? Also, illegal immigrants. Don't they suck?