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Archie, 11/19/13

I know this isn’t news to anyone who’s spent any time reading the adventures of the Riverdale gang, but Archie, the ostensible protagonist of the long-running Archie comics franchise, is kind of unbearable. Normally this is most obvious in the shabby way he treats the multiple young women who for reasons unknowable are in love with him, but his attitude towards his male pals is frankly not much better. Today’s strip is particularly poignant: Archie’s class-based anxieties are on full display as he attempts to worm his way into Veronica’s high society world, and he apparently thinks that loudly mocking his best friend’s poor-person habits is his key to gaining the one percent’s acceptance. Fortunately, Jughead once again proves that the most radical form of resistance to the economic elite is a complete lack of shame over the so-called “manners” they deem so important.

Wizard of Id, 11/19/13

I don’t know what’s more slapdash about this: that all three quotes are from J.R.R. Tolkien (who, for the record, is not the only author in history who has written about wizards), or that the strip freely admits to not bothering to figure out what the second quote even means.

Mark Trail and Mary Worth, 11/19/13

Meanwhile in Mark Trail and Mary Worth, true terror is in progress: old people are falling down! Say what you will about the soap opera strips, but they seem well aware of the main anxieties of their primary audience.

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Archie, 11/14/13

I love that Mr. Weatherbee looks nothing but horrified in each and every panel of this strip. Right from the beginning he’s hunched over and anxious and clutching tightly onto his lapel; it’s not like he’s under any illusions that the superintendent has anything good to say about Riverdale High, after all. And yet the actual report is obviously much, much worse than even he had imagined. Sure, the final panel, in which he’s broken out into full-on panic sweats, is great, but it’s the second panel, in which he realizes that he’s only beginning to understand the meaning of terror and his mind won’t stop screaming inside his skull, is one of my favorite things in Newspaper Archie ever.

Momma, 11/14/13

Wait, did today’s strip and yesterday’s get swapped? Or are Francis and MaryLou just going to keep making Momma go out into the snow until she freezes to death for real?

Mark Trail, 11/14/13

These two panels of insect talk are preeettty boring, so just imagine how dull the two days of fly fishing we’ve mercifully skipped over must’ve been!

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Mark Trail, 11/1/13

Ha ha, that’s a good one, Cherry, but we all know that Rusty doesn’t have any “friends”! Still, the story is plausible enough to satisfy Mark, who after all has managed to come home from his adventure, narrate the entire tale of that time he and a senator grappled with political corruption and then watched a man die, and then sit down to a delicious dinner of whole turkey and white globs before realizing that his beloved ward wasn’t around. Do you think it would’ve taken him this long to notice that Andy was missing? Anyway, that bear has already stumbled upon Rusty’s shallow grave and is right now disposing of the problem, and Cherry knows it’ll be easy enough to find another funny-looking orphan who’ll answer to “Rusty” if he knows what’s good for him.

Archie, 11/1/13

Yup, just another installment in the Terrible Ennui Of Living In Riverdale! “Must be nice to date the captain of the football team!” Betty says to Veronica. “Must be nice to not be inexplicably trapped in the romantic orbit of Archie Andrews, who’s mildly handsome and sort of nice and not particularly smart! God, what a couple of sad chumps we are!” But it turns out Midge finds her romantic links with Moose to be nothing but a crushing embarrassment. Love is nothing but shame!