Apartment 3-G, 1/27/10
Poor Tommie! No human in the history of time has ever asked her to actually repeat one of her boring, forgettable actions; therefore she has no choice but to assume that Blaze is propositioning her with a request for some perverse French sex act.
Spider-Man, 1/27/10
Ha ha, it sure looks like MJ was looking forward to hanging around Miami in her industrial-grade unmentionables without her dopey husband stupiding things up, am I right? Presumably she fears that his sparkling wit (“See, the theater you’re performing in isn’t on Broadway, which is a street in Manhattan … so you might say you’re … wait for it …”) will alienate all of her theater buddies, while trips to the beach will only result in passersby recoiling in disgust from his freakishly oversized arms and nippleless torso.
Crankshaft, 1/27/10
Wow, Montoni’s must be in a more precarious position than I thought if its hated rival is a counter at the mall’s food court where the employees are forced to wear comical faux-ethnic garb. Still, it’s nice to see that Pam likes to spend time with her dad when he’s indulging in one of his favorite hobbies — insulting strangers — and that she still has visceral personal shame-spiral reactions when he lets loose with his unfocused misanthropy.
Mary Worth, 1/27/10
Whoah, it looks like today is one of the three designated days per year when someone in Mary Worth talks sense! Wilbur’s reaction implies to me that he doesn’t entirely understand how the proposed process works. “Kurt, I went to my doctor and I tested positive for paternity. Maybe you should get tested as well! You can never be too sure!”
Crock, 1/27/10
Hey, kids, remember “boom boxes”? They were like iPods, in the ’80s! As near as I can remember, they were covered with brown flesh and sparse hair and were physically attached to their owners, which explains Otis’s mistake.
Spider-Man, 1/26/10
Congratulations, Spider-Man! You have produced the most gratuitous and pointless instance of a lady taking her shirt off in the comics in the long history of that particular art form. “You’ll have to do it in Miami, where women are required by law to walk around in their bras! Remember, Miami is America’s Capital of Tits!”
Blondie, 1/26/10
“Oh, yeah, I forgot! It was easy for me to forget, seeing as the late ’80s were over 20 years ago and all.”
Herb and Jamaal, 1/25/10
Good lord, Herb and Jamaal, I think it would be best for you to stick with what you know — risible non-specificity — because when you try to make up actual names for the inhabitants of your fictional universe, you fail in discombobulating ways. I admit to being totally baffled as to what image “Who Waa Twang” is supposed to evoke — some horribly misguided attempt to create a Chinese or African name, maybe? I’m also having a bit of difficulty buying Herb, who has two young children and a sprightly mother-in-law, as being old enough to have even as a child enjoyed an art form that had more or less vanished by 1955. It’s possible that he managed to convince a significantly younger woman to marry him, since his diminutive stature might have made him appear younger in her eyes.
One thing I do like is the fact that The Guy Who Played “Who Waa Twang” is still an imperious, self-centered ass, like the movie star he is. Fishing saliva-covered false teeth off of the no doubt filthy floor? That’s for the little people! TGWP“WWT” (as they call him in the tabloids) doesn’t bend over to pick stuff up when there are adoring fans to do it for him, and there always adoring fans to do it for him.
Family Circus, 1/25/10
It’s true that I’ve been on a bit of a Family Circus run of late, but how can I not be when it’s so continually and hilariously cruel? My favorite part about today’s panel is the smug little smile on Billy’s face in the background. Clearly Billy realizes that his little brother is so monumentally stupid that he’s literally forgotten how to walk. Perhaps he’s been out there for days, holding that snowball and hoping someone will come within range; it would explain the pile of snow that’s accrued around his feet.
Gil Thorp, 1/25/10
There’s nothing that turns Gil and Mimi Thorp on more than inappropriately matchmaking with their students! Cassie Corman, for those not following along, is a just-turned-18 senior engaged in a tempestuous and parentally unapproved affair with Ray, a pizza jockey with few social or economic prospects. Obviously her parents will be thrilled when she ditches this lout for Steve Luhm, a college drop-out and high school janitor, who under certain conditions might appear to be marginally higher on the social ladder.
Judge Parker, 1/25/10
Whoah, older Spencer adoptee Neddy will soon at last be returning from her Paris sojourn! And with a new boyfriend to boot. I’m intrigued by Sam’s “How young … and how talented?” question, as he appears to be trying to find the sweet spot between “Neddy is shacking up some some 45-year-old has-been” and “Neddy is molesting a child prodigy.”
Also, when Neddy left for Paris (four years and an artist ago in real time, which is, what, three weeks ago in strip time?) she had some boyfriend to whom she tearfully bid goodbye by doing some kind of cool tongue thing, so there’s sure to be room for drama!
Spider-Man, 1/25/10
Whee, Spidey’s thrilling tales of cowardice continue! “I’ve made myself safe by hiding from Sabretooth! Maybe I could make the city safe … by hiding more effectively! I can’t see anything going wrong with this plan, in the sense that if I can’t see it happening because I’m not around to see it, I won’t know about it!”
Blondie, 1/25/10
“I mean, you might think that a genuine pink-and-purple macaw would be pink and purple! But that’s a rookie mistake.”
UPDATE: Uh, speaking of mistakes, as several commentors pointed out, that’s a pink-and-purple beaked macaw, with the coloring actually pretty good for once. The Comics Curmudgeon regrets the error.
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/25/10
Wait, the mule is Looweezy’s aunt? And is also related to her husband somehow? Hootin’ Holler’s kinship networks are even more unsettling than I would have imagined.
Cleats, 1/22/10
On those occasions when I think of Cleats, I think of “gentle (to the point of blandness) humor punctuated by bouts of unspeakable horror.’ This week’s installment, focusing on the whimsical subject of “Bigfoot football,” has mostly been on the gentle-to-the-point-of-blandness side, but only today did I notice that the Sasquatches are using the withered corpse of a beaver as their ball. So that’s something, I guess.
Family Circus, 1/22/10
Dolly, you panderer! The snowman and snowlady should not be left alone in the yard together until they’re married. This is exactly the sort of ideas you get from public schooling.
Hi and Lois, 1/22/10
Chip’s friend is wearing a little hat secured to his head with some sort of elastic chin strap, so, yeah, it’s probably a good idea that he’s reading Style magazine in the second panel.
The poster on the wall indicates that the boys are fans of Paul Butterfield Blues Band keyboardist Mark Naftalin, which is a little disappointing to me because at first glance I just thought they were proponents of free trade.
Mary Worth, 1/22/10
You’ve gotta feel bad for Dawn as she angrily swoops and dances around the nervous Mary. Not long ago her boyfriend cheated on her with another woman, and now she finds out that her father’s sperm cheated with another egg, before she was even born! I have to say that her withering “something” in the second panel is the piece of Mary Worth dialogue most loaded down with contempt since Mary threw “Capisce?” in Aldo’s face.
Spider-Man, 1/22/10
“He thinks I can point him to Wolverine! And he’ll keep attacking me until I do! Unless — I run away, like a coward! Yes, that’s it! Ha ha, can’t catch me, I have the proportional pusillanimity of a spider!”
Gil Thorp, 1/12/10
Say, let’s catch up with Steve Luhm, the promising young man who decided to turn his back on his college career and become a high school janitor! Why would an obviously clever person do such a thing? Today, we learn that Steve is looking for easy access to high school girls, who he wrongheadedly believes will be impressed when he superciliously corrects their basic geography mistakes. Sure, Steve, rub the back of your head bashfully if you will, but you’re obviously hoping that your easy command of body-of-water nomenclature will somehow compensate for your lack of earning power and social status and get you at least to second base with sexy vest girl there. Let me assure you right now that it will not.
One might forgive Steve if he is genuinely the compulsive geographer that he claims. The chances that anybody, even in the “halls of academe,” would be having a dismissive conversation about various seas are extremely low, and this might be the only chance he has to strut his stuff. But I’m thinking it’s more the terribly-awkward-advance thing.
Spider-Man, 1/12/10
Like Spider-Man himself, I’m pretty disoriented by today’s Spider-Man strip. Not only is our hero being abruptly forced in mid-banter to engage in actual heroics, but there wasn’t even any elaborate set-up establishing the extremely low stakes in this conflict. Will this battle somehow reduce Peter Parker’s already low income, which he doesn’t really need anyway because his wife is a movie star? Will it reveal his secret identity to his Aunt May, who probably already actually knows? Will it embarrass him in the press? Will it interfere with his enjoyment of NBC’s Thursday-night lineup?
I’m assuming that the radiating black lines in panel two represent tingling spider-sense, in which case said sense is even less useful than I have hitherto imagined it. Note that Spidey encountered Sabertooth when the former was idly web-slinging around town, only to be abruptly punched in the chest by the latter. If his sense of prescience is only firing off now, as a giant mutant with razor-sharp claws is verbally threatening to kill him while actually lunging at him, I’d have to imagine that this supposed super-power is more distracting than anything else.
Curtis, 1/12/10
Credit where credit is due: “I’m, like, the black Greg Louganis of ice skating” is extremely funny. I’m a little concerned that Curtis appears to have lost a finger on his gloved hand between panels one and two, however.
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Like most of you, I have some New Year’s traditions. Of course, yours probably involve some kind of self-improvement resolutions, which would be unnecessary for me because of my extreme awesomeness. Instead, I generally take the first post of the year to catch up on the action in my beloved continuity strips.
Panel from Dick Tracy, 12/24/09
Let’s start with Dick Tracy, which appears to be as unfamiliar with the social and economic realities of early 21st century classical music as it is with pretty much any other kind of realities you could name.
Panel from Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/26/09
Over in Rex Morgan, the visit of June’s slobbish thieving white-trash cousin has driven this upper-middle-class family to the breaking point. Rex can absorb a lot of punishment, but for God’s sake don’t interfere with his precious, precious breakfast!
Panels from Apartment 3-G, 12/27/09
Against all expectations, Margo managed to enter a church without bursting into flame and crumbling into dust. This can only mean that, while we were wasting our time with the Professor’s boring love life, Margo beat God in a fight off panel.
Funky Winkerbean, 1/3/10
In Funky Winkerbean, the reformed alcoholic title character gazed at a bottle of champagne with more tenderness and affection than he’s ever shown any of his family or friends.
Judge Parker, 1/3/10
Just hours after acting as an unlicensed private investigator, Sam is ready to act as an unlicensed marriage therapist to violent rage maniac Rocky Ledge. One of Rocky’s employees, familiar with the man’s temperament, suggests that Sam will need protective gear before beginning the session.
Mark Trail, 12/28/09
In Mark Trail, Mark and Rusty managed to survive only because this gentle small-town sheriff was too much of a wimp to shoot an unarmed man in the back. I was all excited when it seemed like only Rusty’s head would be saved, leaving him a malformed skull in a jar that Mark would have to tote from place to place…
Mark Trail, 12/31/09
…but instead he just hobbled out of the doctor’s office Tiny Tim-style. His extreme cheerfulness in the face of his crippling is a testament to the powerful painkillers this rural medico has prescribed him.
Oh, and hey, what’s up with Gil Thorp? The Thorps typically celebrate Christmas Day by posing in a family tableau for our entertainment — see for example the entries from 2006, 2007, and 2008. But there’s a little something missing from this year’s installment, isn’t there?
Gil Thorp, 12/25/09
Yes, the holidays do come early when you somehow do away with your children, don’t they, Mimi? Presumably one of the pictures on the mantle there in panel two is of the two young Thorplings, off in their faraway boarding school or Bangladeshi garment factory or shallow grave or wherever they’ve been sent to give the Thorps senior more time to give each other presents and get romantical.
And speaking of presents, the strip give me a little gift last week; as it occasionally does, it brought back a wacky character from the past who only true obsessives like me will remember.
Gil Thorp, 12/28/09 and 12/30/09
In this case, it’s Steve Luhm, who was the protagonist in one of the very first Gil Thorp storylines I read, which was probably the one that got me to fall in love with the strip. Steve was assigned to romance women’s rights agitator Hadley V. Baxendale to keep her from disrupting the Milford patriarchy with her feminism; but instead, he ended up joining Hadley in her political activism, fighting for equal treatment for the girl’s basketball team. As you can see from that old strip, his hair used to be the most beautifully awful thing you’ve ever seen. Steve would later pop up with some hilariously misguided attempts to talk “street”. He got a better haircut and glasses after he went to college, but has not apparently improved his socioeconomic standing. Will this storyline be a biting commentary on the usefulness of a Women’s Studies degree in the post-collegiate world?
Spider-Man, 12/25/09 and 12/30/09
Spider-Man also celebrated Christmas, by having a fat, sweaty man stick a gun in our face. It’s like being robbed by Santa! Later, in keeping with the strip’s traditions, the storyline’s villain was defeated by one of his henchmen while Spider-Man stood by and watched.
But the crown the jewel of the past week or so has been the hot, hot illegitimate son action in Mary Worth.
Mary Worth, 12/25/09
On Christmas Day, Wilbur paused to look back to the past: when he had hair, a flat belly, and the same terrible taste in clothes, and his beloved became the first person in history to pair a belly shirt and an Easter bonnet.
Mary Worth, 12/28/09
But wait! It looks like the fruit of Wilbur’s youthful indiscretion has arrived! And he’s some sort of disheveled hobo!
Mary Worth, 12/29/09
Don’t worry, though: Wilbur can see the beautiful lady beneath the grime and stubble.
Mary Worth, 12/31/09 and 1/1/10
These two strips on either side of the transition to 2010 promise that we’ll be seeing father and son teaming up to become a pair of demon hunters, purging the earth of sinister supernatural forces once and for all.
Mary Worth, 1/3/10
Dawn, meanwhile, keeps her eye on the prize, the prize being Wilbur’s money. “Dad, the last thing you should be doing now is taking responsibility for your actions, especially when it could affect me! We can afford two hideous purple shirts a month for me now. I won’t settle for less than that! I won’t!” Wilbur’s so agitated that he appears to be attempting to chew off his own lower lip.
Yesterday I sent an email to my mother (who has become quite the Mary Worth reader, thanks to my site) asking if she thought this Kurt Evans character was really Wilbur’s son, and this is what she said:
It’s kind of hard to imagine anyone (especially that pretty blond) wanting to have sex with Wilbur!! Maybe he looked better back then. But what are these “demons” that he needs to lay to rest??!! And when does Mary pop in again?? It’s a puzzlement!
It is a puzzlement! A glorious puzzlement that we’ll all enjoy in the coming weeks, which makes me glad to be back in the blogging saddle. PLUS: When will the Curtis Kwanzaa story finally go completely bonkers, as we know it eventually will? We’ll find out as 2010 unfolds!