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Archie, 9/4/09

For a brief moment here, I’m actually feeling kind of bad for Reggie, who is apparently fanatically committed to his role as Riverdale’s #1 asshole. Check out his theatrically prickish expression in the third panel; he’s giggling at his own obnoxiousness so gleefully, he’s about to sprain his face.

Mark Trail, 9/4/09

So, since we met our noble but unemployed backwoodsman, he’s spent most of his time being lobbied heavily by the local sideburn brigade to take up a life of crocodile poaching. But is the illicit crocodile trade really such a bad thing? Maybe not, for those who decide to venture into the swamps bringing tender and delicious little dogs along with them! Prepare to see Rusty and Mark’s fishing trip to go off without incident, since all the giant terror reptiles determined to eat Sassy have long been transformed into handbags, with Mark bellowing “Thanks for the help, illegal poachers!” as they had back to Lost Forest.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/4/09

Oh, Berna, you can keep repeating your questions in simpler and simpler words all you like, but Becka seems to have downed several glasses of wine while waiting for her noodles to be individually hand-crafted back in the kitchen, and has pretty much stopped making sense. Even basic subject-verb agreement is beyond her. “Woman are drawn to Peter! Peter are … handsome man! God, I love him, that dirty, dirty bastard … so handsome … where’s the breadsticks? I never got my breadsticks! You get breadsticks at the Olive Garden … fuck Tito and his sauce. Wait, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, Peter. He thinks he’s so great! Just because he’s attractive … and gifted … and charming … hold on, I think I’m gonna puke.”

Marmaduke and Family Circus, 9/4/09

Ha ha, Marmaduke and Jeffy are planning to “borrow” foodstuffs, and then return them, after they come out of their buttholes.

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Archie, 8/29/09

I’m ashamed to admit it, but I’m vaguely curious to see if the “Archie proposes to Veronica” storyline percolates its way out to the ass-end of the Archie universe (i.e., the newspaper comic strip). The fact that Archie is doing some woo-pitching leaning right there under the tree onto which a proclamation of the eternal love between Archie Andrews and Betty Cooper was once carved. This ought to presage the trail of broken hearts and ruined lives that will be the only possible acceptable denouement to this ill-conceived plot.

Meanwhile, the specific joke today in today’s strip smacks of the AJGLU-3000’s linear humor algorithm. “ARCHIE-UNIT! YOUR SHIRT-DISPLAY OUGHT TO INCREMENT BY A REGULAR AMOUNT EACH STANDARD TIME INTERVAL! YOU WILL RECEIVE NO FURTHER AFFECTION FROM THIS UNIT UNTIL YOU DON YOUR ‘8’ GARMENT!”

Hi and Lois, 8/29/09

Poor Lois wants nothing more nor less than for Hi to come upstairs and satisfy her sexually, but, being a permanent part of a family-friendly newspaper comic strip, can only express her lust in this stilted and roundabout fashion. At least she isn’t suggesting that they “practice making a baby.”

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Archie, 8/22/09

Friends, Romans, comics-lovers, I come to praise the AJGLU-3000 today, not to bury it in scorn! I admit to feeling a frisson of compassion for Mr. Lodge, as his anxious loathing of Archie has reached such a level of intensity as to somehow create some sort of psychic link between the amiable everyteen and Riverdale’s richest man. Just as Harry Potter’s scar surges with pain when his evil nemesis Lord Voldemort is plotting something, so too does Mr. Lodge break out into an anxious sweat whenever the Andrews boy approaches his palatial compound, the route the lad is taking towards shameless moochery off the Lodge fortune burning brightly in his mind. He’s so distracted that he can’t even focus on the financial news, which includes a feature on how the current financial crisis has ruined fellow cartoon plutocrat Rich Uncle Pennybags.

For my money, though, the most intriguing aspect of this cartoon is the way that the Lodge manservant (this is Archie, home of the most painfully obvious nomenclature in English-language literature outside of Pilgrim’s Progress, so I’m pretty sure his name is Jeeves) is lurking half-heartedly in the third panel. I’m not sure if he’s supposed to be hiding himself at the edge of the doorway so as to leap out and bludgeon his employer’s teenage tormentor to death at an opportune moment, or if he’s just realized that he needs to lean over a bit to be visible in the frame, so it doesn’t look like Mr. Lodge is rambling insanely to nobody in particular.

Curtis, 8/22/09

If you were going to start running Curtis in your newspaper and felt like you needed to offer a quick primer on the feature to your readers, you could hardly do better than today’s installment. About two-thirds of the strip’s themes — Curtis doesn’t want his dad to smoke, Curtis likes a girl who can’t stand him, Curtis is emotionally manipulative, Curtis wants money — are packed into just four panels. Add “Barry is even more manipulative” and “Every Kwanzaa the strip goes on a delightfully entertaining two-week long mescaline binge” and you’re all set.

Mark Trail, 8/22/09

So, after investigating environmental misdeeds, witnessing an attempted murder, and then tracking down an assassin, vigilante-style, Mark has turned matters over to … the Department of Homeland Security? Sure, why not. I was going to smugly go on about how ludicrous this was, but DHS is such a huge, baffling catch-all bureaucracy that it may in fact have some kind of division responsible for organized crime intimidation related to illegal disposal of toxic waste for all I know.

I’m sort of impressed by the way the Sheriff Whosit’s word balloon emerges from more or less the same spot in both panels, even though the second is the usual Mark Trail extreme critter close-up. It’s as if the first panel were shot through some sort of x-ray telephoto lens, and then the second was taken after the camera zoomed all the way out but remained otherwise stationary.