Good thing it’s not Princeton, because I’d have some harsh words
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Mary Worth, 11/23/24
Big news everyone. Huge news. Incredible news. Mary is coming down with COVID or the flu or maybe just a bad cold, who’s to say, but the point is that she’s probably going to be too sick to do even the half-assed job of cooking Thanksgiving dinner that she promised to her friends some people she knows from her apartment building. Now, the heartwarming outcome will probably that the gang will come together to do Thanksgiving themselves the best they can and gather ’round her sickbed with their improvised feast, showing Mary how much she’s loved and appreciated, but let’s get real: these are the Westons and the Camerons we’re talking about, and Wilbur and Ian will absolutely be fist-fighting at PriceCo over the last frozen turkey, destroying said turkey and an entire endcap of cans of pumpkin pie filling in the process, while Mary lies on the couch at home, coughing up blood, forgotten and untended.
Hagar the Horrible, 11/23/24
Every time we’re reminded that Hagar’s son is named “Hamlet” I am tickled anew by the thought of Hagar being the analogue of the Ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Still, the plot mechanics don’t really work — Hagar doesn’t have a brother that we know of, and as today’s strip reminds us, the intrafamilial threats he faces lie elsewhere — and frankly neither do the personalities. Hagar is a pretty happy-go-lucky guy, all things considered! Can you imagine him brooding around a castle, hounding his descendents with demands for vengeance? He’d probably just chalk up his death to “one of those things” and move onto Valhalla to see what exactly is going on there.
Flash Gordon, 11/23/24
As much as I love Flash Gordon’s current incarnation, I acknowledge that you’re never going to get a new incarnation of Flash Gordon if the people behind it aren’t a little more fascinated with old timey comics lore than is normal and healthy. This can spin terribly out of hand (see for instance basically every third Dick Tracy strip) but little bits of lore dispensed like easter eggs is all in good fun. For instance, did you know that Flash Gordon, canonically, went to Yale? That’s right. Flash Gordon, two-fisted spaceman, is an Ivy Leaguer — specifically, a Yale man. Depending on your personal prejudices, feel free to imagine that he had an Earthbound life as an irritating comp lit Marxist academic wannabe failson or a coke-addled finance bro failson before he had to the good fortune to end up in space!
53 replies to “Good thing it’s not Princeton, because I’d have some harsh words”
Mary Worth Mashups: Which Missing Final Panel do you prefer?
Rex Morgan Mashup: Do you have better advice than Rex’s in the Missing Final Panel?
MW:
“While it’s fresh on my mind, I want to write a limerick about the romantic ‘encounter’ I just had with Jeff:
“The guy was obsessed with the chase
He tried hard to pick up the pace
But I showed that clown
By shutting him down:
He barely arrived at first base!”
RMMD:
“I particularly liked the Korean drama that explored the culinary preferences of The Doors.”
“Really, Mr. Lewton? — what was it called?”
” ‘Seoul Kitchen’ !”
@Baja Gaijin: I have Mary in the dead pool, so, #3 without question.
RMMD:
“It’s the strangest thing, Doc. You know how in The Picture of Dorian Gray, the portrait of the protagonist is constantly evolving? Well, if you look back at this story arc, I’ve morphed from Ernest Borgnine into Jimmy Hoffa and now Curly Joe DeRita!”
Flash Gordon:
“Now that that’s over, Flash, what exactly is it that we were we trying to communicate to one another and to the readership in today’s panels’ dialogue bubbles?”
“I have no earthly idea, Thun!”
Mary Worth: Ha, Dr. Jeff encounters every disease known to man (or, at least, known to sunny Southern California beach towns) all day long at work. Who’d have thought it would be that chaste half-kiss with his elderly girlfriend that would leave him down for the count from now through New Year’s? Forget “wearing protection” on dates — from now on, he should be masking up!
MW: I think Poteet called this. But hey, she just spent a whole evening with Dr. Jeff, serving him *food* that she had prepared with her own germ-laden hands, and leaning in to an intimate conversation about her shortcut cooking methods. He’s definitely been exposed to whatever nasty thing Mary has contracted. Even now, he could be spreading whatever it is to all the patients in his clinic, and those at Santa Royale Hospital….
Luann: Oh boy! Kip’s heretofore unknown twin brother is here to get tangled up in WACKY shenaniganz when he shows up for a Thanksgiving dinner and ends up in a tug of war between dullard Luann (let me show you my disgusting room!) and Bernice in ‘spontaneous muse’ mode! Maybe TifStefBetsDez can show up and have a catfight!
JP: And cue the car swerving to miss a hallucinating Wilbur and plows both of them into the nearest wall… Please?
Phantom: Welp, that certainly was easy! Seriously though, how much you want to bet this wasn’t the planned ending and the writing and artist were on the recieving end of some ‘friendly advice’ from the syndicate that if they valued their livelihoods they would stop taking ham-handed potshots at one of the most powerful people on the planet?
Flash Gordon:
“I’m glad we handled that situation, Flash! — for a while there, I thought that I was chasing my tail. So to speak.”
MW: Moy approaches Dawn with a proposal to knock off Mary and have her take over the strip to appeal to a younger audience. “Okay.” She replies. “As long as I don’t have to fuck Dr. Jeff.”
Flash Gordon:
“Your college mascot was a bulldog, Flash? — where’d you go? Yale? Georgia? Butler? Drake? Gonzaga?”
“Nah, Southwestern Oklahoma State University, in Weatherford.”
MW: Looks like Mary’s about to have some serious regrets about always rejecting Jeff’s marriage proposals while refusing to explain. “Gee, Mary, I’d love to come help care for your life-threatening illness with my decades of medical experience, but that’s really more of a wife or fiancee thing. I’ll send you a card, though. Good luck!”
FG: “These birds are scavengers, not hunters. Please disregard the fact that we are not carrion and they just tried to kill and eat us. Also, they didn’t attack the ship, even though we know they ate our men by ripping it open and devouring them. Totally different from an attack. In fact, no one attacked the ship, because it was sabotaged, which is also totally different from an attack, somehow, maybe. Hey, can someone else talk for a while? I think I might be really bad at this semantic stuff.”
MW – Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu, perhaps….
HtH – It irritates her Crone’s Disease….
FG – Huh – Flash was a Radcliffe Bulldog – who knew….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
@Hibbleton: isn’t Dr Jeff the only male employee at the hospital Dawn hasn’t dated?
MW: Meanwhile, Jeff, Ed, Estelle, Wilbur, Dawn, Saul, Eve, Sheila See, and Tim Walz all come down with the same symptoms. With seven of them filling up the ICU, and the others are placed in the isolation ward. Shortly thereafter, Priceco announces a recall of their signature trays.
Beatup Bailey: ….and Super Chicken arrives in time to save Sarge, Beatup, and the Jeep. Unfortunately Sarge ate all his.Secret Sauce.
Apparently Flash is canonically a polo player, which settles the question of which obnoxious Ivy League stereotype he was. The movie made him more relatable by turning him into a quarterback, which you might think stretched credibility by having an Ivy League jock become a starter in the NFL,* but it was for the Jets.
*yes blah blah Ryan Fitzpatrick
FC: Jeffy still manages a knot in his velcro.
@Dennis Jimenez: FG – Huh – Flash was a Radcliffe Bulldog – who knew….
______________
Ironically, Flash didn’t, he’s still blanking out his mind to help himself to the Lion Queen’s sense patterns.
CS: After five days of self-indulgent babbling and zero shadowing, this shadowing story is now over and Emily got an A+ despite completely failing to do her assignment. I had subterranean expectations for this story and Tom Batiuk still managed to tunnel under them.
Luann: Giddy Dialysis Nurse is supposed to be an obviously sexy hunk? If you’re into scrawny dweebs with sloppy hair, sure, but for those of us who aren’t 9 Chickweed Lane characters, this is a bit perplexing.
DT: Yes, Costello, we know the clock tower is going to be the scene of the arbitrary climactic showdown. We heard you the first ten times. You can stop now.
RMMD: Merle Lewton was the closest thing this soap had to a final remaining fun character who could kick off a storyline about how chemtrails are making him sick or 5G towers are turning his dog queer or whatever. Now he’s just one more boring old man whose medical problem is mild grogginess from watching too much TV. Lame. The next story is probably going to be about Rene Belluso marrying Nancy the Bully and settling down as a suburban couple who enjoy eating diner food and listening to roots country.
Hagar’s mother-in-law is a witch, right? Just trying to get the lore straight, so I know if her nose is a penis because another witch cursed her, or if that’s something she did to herself for her “me time”.
MW: Mary hands Ian a martini sans pearl onion. “Why I never! Let’s go, Toby.”
“
MW: Toby has already said outright, “I can’t cook,” and as for the rest of them, well, pfft. It’s saltines and water for Thanksgiving, and Mary will be lucky if someone tosses her a cough drop.
JP: Getta Room!
MW:
“Maybe I developed an allergic reaction from contact with Jeff’s skin bracer during our brief osculatory encounter, and I got Mennen-gitis!”
CS: And Blonde Girl is able to quickly escape a Batty story line unscathed and unscarred. Except for the nightmares about the arm. They’re horrible.
JP: In a nearby apartment, someone opens a window and blasts, “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?”
Frazz: “What do you mean I didn’t learn a thing about Caulfield? Don’t you listen to anything I say? I already know he’s an asshole. I merely provided further proof.”
Why am I not surprised to see Mary using a cookbook from the 1930’s? “Oh, good, my silphium and garum stocks are still in good shape. Those would have been a lot harder to replenish than pearl onions.”
FC-Three, four. Jeffy’s coming for you.
MW-“I can’t get sick. I’m the Mary Worth. I make others sick.”
MW: here’s hoping the entire Ed and Estelle wedding party is sick.
Don Abundio, translated:
“How long have you been sitting like that, boss?”
“Oh, a couple of hours”
“I thought you said you were going for a swim”
“Yeah, but I changed my mind”
“I don’t want to wash off the rest of my tan”
DT: I’m pretty sure that Costello thinks they key point we should be remembering here is that the building inspector told Dick the clock tower was “structurally sound. Clock machinery’s a mess, though.” And if it’s structurally sound, what possible legitimate reason could there be for limiting access to a space filled with giant rusting cogwheels and counterweights?
GT: Boy, this strip with father and son driving home from a game where they were on opposite sides in silence before Coach Luke just says “I didn’t see that coming” would be a masterclass in telling a story through facial expressions if it had actually made any attempt to do so.
JP: And the moral is that if you want a girl to kiss you, you have to pretend to accept that she isn’t looking for romance right now convincingly. Well, Crankshaft dragged me back in, so I guess that leaves a space in my “I just can’t any more” list…
Phantom: Fun challenge: explain how Stripey’s presence affected the outcome of this “adventure” in any way.
Pluggers: I had to check that this wasn’t the same contributor as yesterday, but nope. Both called Mike, though. If you know a Plugger named Mike, probably best to put a lock on your tool box.
@matt w: “Apparently Flash is canonically a polo player….”
The Gordons came over on the Mayflower, yo. In 1934, obnoxious WASPS were always the heroes. Alex Raymond read a lot of Madison Grant.
@Scott Christian Simmons:
“I was going to get something from Ina‘s much more recent cookbook, but the recipes in there are kind of Garten variety!”
Luann’s getting moist by meeting Phil McCracken.
MW: As “heartwarming” (for certain values of the term) it would be for Mary’s neighbors to step up when she falls ill, remember that a) everyone just assumes that she’ll do all the cooking and hasn’t volunteered to bring so much as a pie or an hors d’oeuvres tray and b) this is Mary Worth, where any woman prioritizing her own needs is subject to shame and Wilbur-centric nightmares. More likely Mary will refuse to complain or admit something’s wrong until she collapses while presenting the turkey, spilling the artfully plated bird all over the floor. Everyone will insist that she should have said something, that they would have helped, really, if only they knew how much they were putting on her! (Everyone except Wilbur, who will be gorging himself on floor turkey.)
HtH: However, I would totally buy that Hagar’s mother-in-law is one of the Weird Sisters from “Macbeth.”
Josh Josh Josh – wasn’t Mary kissing Dr. Jeff mere days ago on the lips?
This thing is gonna sweep through Santa Royale like wildfire.
Dare we use the words: Typhoid Mary?
MW Well, it’s not the way I would have predicted they ended this strip, but statistically probably the most likely for a woman her age. Anyhow, farewell to Mary Worth, and I look forward to The Wacky Adventures of Wilbur Weston.
C’shaft: “Well, gee, I thought ‘the lede’ (not ‘lead,’ you pretentious hack) was that I had found in you a source of inspiration and motivation, so much so that I was considering following in your footsteps. But you don’t give a damn about that, so I’m falling back on my original plan of becoming a business major. Enjoy your dying industry, asshole.”
DT: A princess kidnapped at infancy would be an interesting change of pace for this strip…
Dustin: Who carries cash these days, especially among the Gen-Z crowd? Hell, the Divalings have their own kid-friendly debit cards. Does Dustin plan on taking his date to a strip club and need some singles? (You know, that is the sort of thing he’d do.)
JP: I see Sophie has invested in that color illusion dress, showing that she’s up on the hottest trends of 2015.
Luann: Finally, Luann has found her true purpose: obsessing over men!
Phantom: *script produced by ChatGPT
MW- hopefully something that Jeff brought back from his many trips to Vietnam so it’ll be hard to diagnose.
But the whole scenario is just an ad for Priceco, as they have “Full Thanksgiving dinners at reasonable prices”
CRANKSHAFT: This story is giving the comic LEAD poisoning (Tee hee, it’s funny because ace journalist Skip Rawlings, the bestest reporter and editor ever doesn’t really know what “Burying the LEDE” means.)
MW: frankly I’m not looking forward to a week of Mary calling Ralph on the big white telephone.
Since Hagar the Horrible pre-dates Shakespeare by a few centuries, I’m guessing that Hagar has the ability to travel forward in time to check out cool names. For his daughter Honi, I like to think he landed in 1968 and heard a Bobby Goldsboro song that checked some boxes for him. Specifically, death.
MW: The Case of the Contagious Cook
“Hello, Beautiful!” Paul Drake exclaimed as he came through the inner office door.
Della Street looked up from where she was perched on the corner of Perry Mason’s desk. “Good morning, Paul,” she said, smiling warmly. “Coffee?”
“No, thanks, Della. I’m a little on the…delicate side this morning.”
“Oh?”
“I had leftovers for dinner, and they’re just not sitting right.” Paul sat down on the sofa and sighed. “It looked okay, but I’m afraid my friend Jeff kept them out of the refrigerator a little longer than he should have. My mistake.”
“Shouldn’t you be home, then?” Della inquired solicitously.
“Nah, I’ll be okay. Anyway, Perry needed me to do some work today. Something about a doctor being accused of poisoning patients at Santa Royale Hospital. What’s the story?”
“Oh, that!” Della frowned. “You know, I have an aunt who’s a patient there right now, and I have to admit, I’m a little worried. She seemed to be ready for discharge but had a sudden, unexplained relapse. And she’s not the only one, it seems. The cases are all occurring on a particular wing, but so far, they don’t know the source, or whether it’s a doctor, nurse–who knows, it could even be a candy striper!”
Just then, Perry entered the office and placed his briefcase on the desk. Della started to smile at him, until she saw the serious expression on his face. “What is it, Perry?’
“Della, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. Your aunt….”
Della straightened in alarm. “Aunt Minnie?”
“She died this morning, Della. I’m sorry.” Perry shot a significant glance at Paul. “We’ll have to do some fast work, Paul. Two other patients at Santa Royale also died overnight. From the reported symptoms, it seems they all took an unexpected but similar turn for the worse, even though they were hospitalized for different reasons to begin with. And Lt. Tragg tells me at least four other patients are in the same situation.”
Della, a stricken look on her face, blurted out, “Aunt Minnie is dead? What caused it, Perry?”
“Some sort of splak. We don’t know where it came from, only that it made its way into the hospital. One minute, the patients were seemingly fine, and the next they were doubled over in–”
Della gasped as Paul Drake suddenly collapsed onto the floor, himself gasping out, “The…splak!”
FG: Given our society’s obsession with “winners”, I am guessing the new Flash is a member of the 2-time national champion Georgia Bulldogs football team.
Why isn’t Flash playing in the NFL?
In keeping with team tradition, there was that little incident where Flash drove his Hummer through a school playground. At recess.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
On the lead/lede thing, I actually liked that Skip/Batty used “lead” whether either knows the difference.
I’ve always found “lead” (long e) to be fine since it means leading. Maybe lede is a derivation of that, and it has the advantage of not being mistaken for lead (soft e).
I’ve found lede to be a bit jargony, like it’s a way for people in journalism to show that they’re in the know with this stuff.
So, even though Crankshaft was typically stupid, I was pro-spelling on this one.
And is it definite that Batiuk is winding this down and retiring it at the end of the year? I really enjoyed Crankshaft 30+ plus years ago. I suppose it’s hard to continue the same theme of a cranky old man and it gets off into directions that aren’t as good after a long time. I did like the early hyperbole (Ed going up Turtle Hill in his bus) similar to some of the hyperbole from the good days of Funky.
Unlike Crankshaft, which went into a gradual decline, Batty ruined Funky when he did a radical time jump. But the original Funky was really good.
MW: Meanwhile across town, Dr. Jeff smiles. “The virus should be working by now. Good. You’ve sullied my manhood the last time Mary.”
Fifty years ago today, newspapers were telling the story of the daring, partially-bungled Purlator heist! Meanwhile in Gasoline Alley Rufus and Joel were breaking into someone’s shed.
MW: Oh Josh, we can only hope…
MW: who holds Mary’s hair while she’s poised over the toilet?
That thing you’re coming down with, Mary – it’s called food poisoning. Everyone who was at the wedding has it.