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Archie, 2/27/10

I kind of love Jughead’s melodramatic hat-flipping drink-exploding spit-take of rage in panel three. It’s as if this final bit of Archie idiocy is just too much for him to handle. “Argh, I can’t believe I’ve been playing second banana to this moron for seventy years!”

Mary Worth, 2/27/10

If Mary Worth wants to dedicate a panel a day to Wilbur and Kurt’s ludicrous tomfoolery indefinitely, I for one would be OK with that. Today sets a hilariously low bar for the definition of “quality time.” “Hey Wilbur, hey Wilbur, check this out — I’m eating my own finger! Ha ha! No, don’t worry I’m not doing it really, but look, it looks like I am! Pretty funny, right?”

Spider-Man, 2/27/10

I’m sure these firefighters are just thrilled to have some out-of-town semi-employed “photojournalist,” armed with what appears to be a plastic Fisher-Price “My First Camera,” standing six inches behind them narrating every thought in his head aloud while they attempt to do their jobs. “Gosh, you guys, if we were in New York, Spider-Man could totally help me out right about now! But, uh, he doesn’t live here. Hey, is that someone burning to death upstairs? You guys? Anyone else hear that?”

Gil Thorp, 2/27/10

Aw, look how pleased Coach Kaz looks in the final panel — for once, someone is coming to him for advice! Sadly, it will just be another young man asking furtive questions about unbearable itching “down there,” proving once again why it’s a bad idea to overshare about your personal life when you’re substitute-teaching a high school health class.

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Archie, 2/2/10

There are a number of unsettling objects that have spilled out of Jughead’s locker. It’s probably actually not unsettling to see that Jughead owns at least one spare crown-hat; I had (I think with some justification, based on his character) assumed that Jughead only owned a single hat, which was by this point frayed and stained with years of hair-grease. Any points gained for this are instantly lost, however, by the sight of that sandwich, which despite its many layers is cohering together as a single, immutable unit as it tumbles across the rubble, possibly due to its condiments having long ago congealed into a binding more powerful than concrete. And, of course, the less said about the tiny scale model of Archie as a double amputee the better.

Crock, 2/2/10

Wow, if you had asked me who Crock’s chief gag artist saw as his avatar in the strip, the loathed and incompetent leader of the Lost Patrol would not have been anywhere on my list. But I can sort of see the connection.

Marmaduke, 2/2/10

Ha ha, some namby-pamby liberal judge thinks that Marmaduke can be restrained from his usual horrors by an electronic ankle bracelet! At best, the device will merely offer the authorities the means to create a real-time map of his swath of devastation.

Mary Worth, 2/2/10

Even Wilbur is getting bored by the tales of his romantic failures, and so he decides to liven things up with a hearty Black Power salute. Soon afterwards, someone comes by and gives him a soothing scalp massage, if what I’m seeing in panel two makes any sort of sense in the Euclidian space-time continuum that I’m accustomed to.

Phantom, 2/2/10

So, it appears that the Phantom is going to use his presumed widowhood to go around boffing all the ladies who ever had eyes for him. We begin with Captain Savarna, who made eyes at him during the Crocco Adventure (no, really) that happened last year, and is now wooing him with her butt-sculpting “uniform” pants and strokeable phallic torpedoes. Later, our hero will presumably finally make the Jungle Patrol gals’ dreams of seducing their Unknown Commander come true. We’ll eventually find out how well the “But honey, I assumed you were dead!” approach works as a justification for infidelity, especially when the unfaithful partner doesn’t bother to do much legwork to actually confirm his widowed status.

Momma, 2/2/10

Based on what I’ve learned from Apartment 3-G, I’m guessing Momma is showing up for her weekly sex-for-pills appointment. The pinched look on her face indicates that she’s past the point of even pretending to enjoy it.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/8/09

Uh-oh, it looks like the Morgan household has got a case of the squatters! And they’re slobs, too, and one of them is a busty blonde who looks capable of at least briefly experiencing joy — exactly the sort of person that June is most likely to skewer with one of her patented soul-freezing glares.

You know, sometimes when I return to my house, I have the strange, unbidden thought that perhaps I’ve passed into a parallel universe where I don’t exist, and someone else will be living there. I wonder if something like this has happened to the Morgans — if their cruise ship accidentally passed through the Bermuda Triangle or something, and now they’ve returned to a town exactly like the one they left, except nobody’s ever heard of them. This would guarantee hilariousness, as virtually everything this power couple does is based on an overwhelming sense of their own entitlement. The anger and befuddlement that will ensue when their increasingly plaintive cries of “But don’t you know who we are?” are met with honest “No”s will be delicious.

Archie, 12/8/09

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, especially for an emergent cybernetic consciousness. It’s been long established that the Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000, the massive computer that creates the Archie newspaper comic, is connected to the Internet and aware of this blog; but now it appears to have decided that I am its primary audience, and is specifically filling its strip with things that unsettle and amuse me, including people gazing lovingly at their own image on computer monitors and creepy furries whose deranged eyes glow out from the otherwise inky black maw of their fursuits.

Still, the AJGLU 3000 deserves credit for adding some character development to this strip. In most iterations of the Archie mythos, Reggie exists solely as an arrogant, egotistical foil and occasional romantic rival to Archie. However, as depicted by the AJGLU 3000, when he’s behind his (Reggie-themed-photo festooned) editorial desk, he does seem determined to do a halfway credible job of running the school newspaper, an attitude worthy of praise. Of course, this being Reggie, he’s probably only doing it because he believes that a career in print journalism is his ticket to power and influence; this is misguided, but not as misguided as Archie’s apparent belief that a career in print journalism is his ticket to sex with cheerleaders.

Hi and Lois, 12/8/09

Ever since the real-estate market imploded, Lois has had little to do with her time other than hang out at the mall with her fellow realtors and talk about which mood-altering pills are the most fun and which crooked doctors will prescribe them.