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Archie, 11/30/12

We have proved with painstaking historical research that the current run of Archie newspaper comics originated in the early 1990s. Today’s strip offers more evidence of this: it’s set in a time period where this whole “recycling” business was something that eager, green-minded teens had to teach their hidebound parents, who just wanted to throw all their garbage directly into the water supply, in accordance with the traditions of their ancestors. Unfortunately, the strip’s creators from this era did not have access to any young people (something that probably shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering that Archie has always treated teenagers with contempt), so they appear to have reconstructed the recycling process from secondhand reports. It involves having unboxed waist-high piles of neatly folded newspapers on your lawn, right?

Gil Thorp, 11/30/12

I’m pretty sure we’ve never actually seen Terry Gallagher’s dad over the course of this storyline, so I’m kind of intrigued by the fact that Terry’s mom says that he “doesn’t bring her a strategy” when he “messes up.” What kind of “messing up” does he typically perpetrate? Has he been missing for the past few months because of how badly he “messed up”? Not to engage in ugly stereotyping, but isn’t most likely that Mr. Gallagher is drunk in a gutter right now, “messing” himself “up”, with no “strategy” to get back home? Those aren’t footsteps you want to follow in, kid!

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Mary Worth, 11/29/12

You know how you can tell you’re in a good psychology program? When your professor has written all kinds of psychology-y stuff on the whiteboard. “Um, ego, id … crap, what’s the third one? I know there’s a third one. Is it dreams? That doesn’t sound right, but half of every lecture is taken up by dumb nineteen-year-olds asking me to interpret their anxiety and/or sex dreams, so I might as well write that up there. Now, Freud and Jung … which one was played by Viggo Mortensen and which by Michael Fassbender? Gotta remember to look that up later.”

You know how else you can tell you’re in a good psychology program? When your professor’s lecture makes you visualize the angry, controlling, emotionally damaged young man whose romantic feelings you don’t reciprocate and think “I wish I could break down his barriers and make him love me — but only as a friend.”

Archie, 11/29/12

The Western calendar, derived as it is from ancient Roman and Egyptian models and tweaked over the centuries to match our increasingly accurate measurements of the earth’s revolution around the sun, contains months of varying lengths, leap days subject to complex rules, and a weekly cycle that doesn’t match up exactly with either the monthly or yearly cycles. This actually makes writing calendaring code a fairly tricky computer programming problem! Nevertheless, the rules for Thanksgiving are relatively simple — it’s the fourth Thursday in November, not the last Thursday, which means that someone on the Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000 programming team seems to have made something of a goof.

Crankshaft, 11/29/12

hate contempt rage bitterness misguided attempts to please a mother who can never feel love HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM ALL OF US IN THE FUNKYVERSE, EVERYBODY

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Mary Worth, 11/24/12

Oh my goodness, Mary. You … you really want to do this? It seems like you want to do this. Fine. Everyone, once upon a time — 2006, to be exact — there was a Mary Worth storyline that involved a man who wanted to be more than friends with Mary, and it was a very important moment in the history of this blog. Click any of the links below, for the Glory and the Majesty!

• Aldo Kelrast moved into Charterstone and immediately started saying skeevy things about Mary’s lovely hands.
• Turns out he was attracted to Mary because she looked just like his dead wife (marginally less creepy than Dawn looking like Jim’s dead sister, we guess?).
• Mary told him she wanted to be just friends with him. Actually, her exact words were that “it’s best if we don’t socialize too closely.”
• Nevertheless, he kept hanging around, so she had to be a little blunter.
• Eventually, she resorted to talking like one of those ethnic gangsters from the movies in an attempt to deter him.
• It got bad enough that Mary’s friends all staged an intervention, as if that were a way that people dealt with stalkers they barely knew in real life.
• The shame of it all drove Aldo — a recovering alcoholic who had given up the booze after his wife slipped and died in the bathtub when he was passed out drunk — directly to the liquor store.
• Getting drunk and then getting behind the wheel of a car? Amateur stuff. Aldo got behind the wheel of a car and then got drunk.
• Oops, maybe not such a good idea!
• Could he really be dead? Yep!
• Our heroes felt kind of bad about this.
• But pretty soon they were able to rationalize it.
• Then Mary went and put flowers on his grave, as a final “screw you, stalk-o.”

This — this — is the backstory to what Mary is telling Dawn. If the friendship is strong enough, your aggressive paramour will understand that no means no. And if he isn’t … well, are you ready to kill, Dawn? Kill in a way that leaves no trail back to you? Because that’s what it takes, Dawn. That’s what it takes.

Beetle Bailey, 11/24/12

I normally don’t care to know any of the backstory to the half-hearted hijinks of Beetle Bailey, but I admit this one has me curious. How long was General Halftrack followed around by an eager documentarian? Do you think he knew in his heart of hearts that it had gone badly, or had he deluded himself until this moment that he’d look like a hero to movie-going audiences everywhere? Is the titular Disaster at Camp Swampy a single, disastrous incident that was caught on film, or is it referring to the metaphorical, slow-motion disaster that’s so all-pervasive that the soldiers stationed there won’t be able to recognize it until they see it on the big screen?

Archie, 11/24/12

Ha ha, I love how angry Reggie is at the space monsters, for failing to open diplomatic relations with Earthlings. “How dare these extraterrestrial chumps refuse to speak to me! Have they even seen my amazing stripy sweater?”