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Family Circus, 7/19/09

You might have noticed the title of the book Big Daddy Keane is reading to his little ankle-biters, Rat and Pig Get Lost, which is an installment in a good-natured back and forth between the Family Circus and Pearls Before Swine. More intriguing, though, is what this cartoon reveals about the Keane Kids: not only are they illiterate, but they can’t even sit still to be read aloud to, and rather will wander in the direction of the hypnotic, glowing picture box, the better to move their brains past their current gelatinous state and straight on into liquidity.

Mary Worth, 7/19/09

While this installment might seem to be taking place immediately on the heels of yesterday’s, with Mary tidying up and thought-ballooning like mad and Delilah wandering aimlessly around the grounds, note that both ladies have changed into completely different (though still hideous) outfits, so this could be days or months later. But apparently enough time has passed that Delilah is finally ready to make a call … to her dealer, if her freakishly enlarged pupils are any indication.

Slylock Fox, 7/19/09

The main mystery panel in today’s strip is fairly bland — another fox-mouse double date leading up to some drunken partner-swapping that the radical differences in size will make incredibly awkward — but I’m pretty intrigued by the scene over in Six Differences. Are the woodland herbivores engaging in some kind of Druid ritual to call down a lightning strike against their predator-enemy, the terrible wolf? I hope the pagan magic will keep the beavers safe, as I’m not sure the open water is the best place to be in a thunderstorm.

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Garfield, 7/18/09

Some years back, some friends of mine got married at a little camp they had rented in lovely Big Island, Virginia, in the rural foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. After the reception, they headed over to a nearby bed and breakfast, while most of the guests crashed overnight at the camp; the next day, the happy couple came back to the camp to have lunch with us, with a tale to tell. Apparently, there was one other couple also spending their wedding night at the bed and breakfast that night, and at breakfast the next morning, they looked like they were in more or less a state of shock — as my friend put it, they appeared to have experienced “a night full of terrible discoveries.” That’s what popped into my mind here when I saw John and Liz’s traumatized faces. Have they crossed some line, gone someplace from which they can never return? Will they ever be the same again? Was there a lot of tongue involved?

I’m amused, meanwhile, that Garfield feels a need to euphemize a disgust-prompted quantum of vomit as a “hairball.” Perhaps Paws, Inc., believes that the newspaper comics morals police would accept a reference to the sort of regurgitation natural to the cat lifestyle, whereas straight-up barfing would be forbidden. Clearly, they hadn’t seen this.

Mary Worth, 7/18/09

Speaking of people who have just experienced a night of terrible discoveries, check out Mary and Delilah’s devastated facial expressions here. You’ll have noticed that, while I breathlessly kept you up to date two weeks ago on every aspect of the interaction between Mary, Delilah, and Charley, I have been silent in the aftermath; that’s because the aftermath was boring, consisting of Mary and Delilah having the same pointless conversation, about how Delilah should get back together with her husband and Delilah saying she’d like to but she’s not sure, that they had for like three solid weeks leading up to the wonderful Charley episode. Mary is now washing her dishes with a look of defeated resignation on her face, her meddling having apparently failed to break through Delilah’s thick skull. Delilah, meanwhile, has chosen to wander unescorted around Charterstone in her revealing outfit, which will surely result in Charley leaping out of the bushes and wooing her with more transparent sleazy banter. Thus are the punishments the gods dish out to those who ignore Mary’s sound advice.

Gil Thorp, 7/18/09

Meanwhile, in Gil Thorp: The Stalkening, it appears we just might have a worthily bonkers summer storyline. WHO could hurling these baseballs at Gil and/or leaving them in his mailbox, since Shep Trumbo is “on vacation” (i.e., in prison for loosening the caps of all those saltshakers)? Who has Gil wronged in a baseball-themed manner, leading him to lurk in the shadows, wearing a Phantom of the Opera-style half-mask, cackling evilly and plotting revenge? Could it be Elmer Vargas, now condemned to work for the Kalamazoo Kings for all time? Clambake, whose dreams of baseball coaching glory were forever ruined by his ugly season with the Mudlarks? Everyone who’s played on the baseball team for the past six years and failed to go anywhere in the playdowns?

Mark Trail, 7/18/09

I’ve never had anyone assassinated by a sniper right in front of me, but I’m willing to bet the resulting noise would really be more like a BLAM or a KA-POW or a neeeeerrrMMP than a WHAM. However, the more important question is: what sound effects will the bullets make as they are punched out of the air one by one by Mark, as he slowly and deliberately makes his way back to confront our sinister villain?

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Spider-Man, 7/17/09

God bless the newspaper Spider-Man strip; it’s more powerful than even I could have imagined. Its ability to suck the drama and excitement out of any storyline it touches and replace it with its own imperatives — cheesy jokes, endless domestic scenes, and totally pointless, neurotic fretting about the revealing of secret identities — is truly impressive. So overwhelming is this anti-dramatic forcefield that here we have Marvel Entertainment, Inc. uber-badass Wolverine sitting with Peter and MJ at some terrible no-star restaurant and making his first-ever friends.

I seem to recall a bit in the first X-Men movie where Wolverine admitted, in an emo but manly way, that every time his claws popped out, it was painful, so naturally he’s using them here to manipulate the brown globby food slabs that he’s ordered. Look at MJ, Logan! You should cut your slabs up into blobs and eat them with a shrimp fork.

Ziggy, 7/17/09

You might think that the joke here is that a toaster is not, in fact, fun for the whole family, and thus the sign is deeply misguided. But it goes deeper: Since Ziggy has no family, and nobody loves him or ever has, he has no context for what might constitute family fun. Thus, he stares at the window display, expressionless. Is this the sort of device that families use, to enjoy themselves? He may buy it just to find out; when it fails to alleviate his soul-rending lonliness, he’ll just take it into the bathtub in an attempt to end it all that will end up failing, furthering his humiliation.

Marvin, 7/17/09

Ha ha, Marvin is going to be pecked to death, by seagulls! I take back everything bad I ever said about birds.