Momma: I'm sorry your husband took his own life, Sadie.

You know, comics about characters joking around about how they wish they were dead because their marriages are so miserable were getting kind of stale for me. Fortunately, today's Momma really takes things to the next level of hilarity by having a character literally kill himself and then having his hateful wife point out that he did it because their marriage was miserable.

The only thing that could have made it more humorous is if we had actually seen his lifeless body hanging from the rafters or something. But I'm holding out hope that we'll eventually get that scene when Mort Walker Inc. finally decides to write General Halftrack out of Beetle Bailey.

The Phantom: Dad, we need you HERE! We MISS you!

And by "doing important work" The Phantom of course means "terrorizing people who might be terrorists, though they haven't actually been found guilty of anything, but those are just laws and who needs those ha ha."

Also, as The Phantom surely knows, it will never "end." There will always be bad people in the world, and thus he will always have an excuse to completely ignore his family. He can't help it! He's a hero!

*Second Phantom comic from 5-18-10.

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.

Mark Trail: Morning, Sally, are you out looking for more homeless animals?

The introduction of Sally, the fat, lonely animal collector, has given this Sassy-centric story enormous potential. Will she and Sassy bond to one another and become inseparable, only to have Mark and Rusty show up and ruin their lives? Or will she turn out to run a dog meat factory with some long-haired ruffian? Only time will tell!

Family Circus: Can you do anything with scenery besides look at it?

And so Dolly has evidently regained her ambition to control not just the people of the world but the natural world itself.

Thanks a lot, Prophet Billy.

Beetle Bailey: That's not a good sign.

Beetle has discovered that the Camp Swampy cook's secret ingredient is bird poop, and this has rightly disgusted him.

Sarge will most likely not care, however, given his debilitating and hilarious food addiction.

Cul de Sac: Hey! The kid on the Blisshaven sign is that kid who's on TV!

For all the comics around that feature children, Cul de Sac is the only one that really gets what kids are like. This is just exactly how kids act. Every panel and every character, even the silent girl in the fourth panel whose emotions are conveyed entirely through the art, rings true to life. I'm especially fond of the wild overreaction at the end, which isn't anything like a traditional punchline, but is nonetheless far funnier than every other final panel I've seen today.

Tiger: I can't tell.

The guy who draws Sally Forth has solved the problem of feet by almost always drawing his characters wearing socks. This fellow is apparently a genius, as no other cartoonist has, as of yet, considered such an option, even in cases (see above) in which they really, really should.

Family Circus: I'm ready if anybody wants to break something.

"Like bones or fun stuff like that."

Mark Trail: The little dog, anxious to return home, jumps off the table and runs toward the door.

Should we really be surprised that animals are smarter than humans in the Elrodverse?

In all seriousness, though, Sassy's shifty eyes in the second panel are fantastic.