Post Content

Marvin, 9/6/09

You know, I’m pretty much a prematurely jaded cynic, but sometimes the comics can still surprise me. Marvin in particular always manages to surprise me with the new depths of horror it reaches every week. Let’s review today’s trauma:

  • This strip introduces entirely new characters, two bees drawn with the enormous noses that defile the faces of most of the human males populating this feature.
  • The bees believe that their purpose in life is to sting people for no good reason by the end of the summer; if these are ordinary honeybees, this is of course a suicide mission.
  • The bees are intensely focused on stinging a human on the buttocks, which they refer to as a “rear assault.”
  • The bees attempt to sting Marvin on the buttocks, but are prevented by his “padded armor,” which, this being Marvin, presumably includes a layer of feces.
  • The bees are crushed to death by Marvin’s ass.

And then, the ultimate insult: the Stars and Stripes, dragged unwilling into the opening panels as some kind of attempt to justify this atrocity. Why does Marvin hate America?

Apartment 3-G, 9/6/09

As is its wont, Sunday’s Apartment 3-G provides us with relatively little new information, but I do think that it throws a couple of important facts into stark relief:

  • The Professor is prescribing powerful sleeping pills to Ms. Merrill after she mentions that another doctor gave her some years ago, and is thus violating professional ethics and several laws, because he wants to bone her.
  • Margo is almost insanely insensitive. “Yes, I haven’t been to the gallery that Eric owns since he died. So many bad memories there! Not like you, who only associate this place with good thoughts about your dead boyfriend.”

Pluggers, 9/6/09

OH SNAP SINISTER ALLIGATOR/VULTURE MAN-BEASTS! You don’t lay off someone with a nationally syndicated comic unless you want to suffer nationally syndicated comics wrath five months later! I am charmed enough by the righteous burn that I will pass over the laughable notion that any plugger would work in a cubicle job. HEY AFGHAN LADY I BET YOU’RE NOT GOING TO BE SUCH A SNOB ABOUT FREE SAMPLES FOR DINNER ANYMORE, ARE YOU?

Funky Winkerbean, 9/6/09

“Which makes sense, when you consider that it’s not really funny, at all.”