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Mary Worth, 1/8/07

MARY’S GOING TO VIETNAM! MARY’S GOING TO VIETNAM! MARY’S GOING TO VIETNAM!

“In person” even! This is too important to take care of via teleconferencing or astral projection!

For some reason I keep thinking of the song “Old Hippie” by the Bellamy Brothers, which my mom loved when I was a kid. It contains the following line:

“Then they sent him off to Vietnam on his senior trip.”

Mary’s sort of doing the same, although her senior status means that she’ll be shouting at locals both because she thinks they’ll understand English if she does and because she’s going deaf.

There are so many awesome possibilities to this plotline that I’m practically overbrimming with joy at them, even though I know that this is Mary Worth and thus only the most boring ones will actually occur. But still, it’s fun to imagine: Will Mary end up lost in a jungle and have to feed herself by hunting and fishing? Will she be kidnapped and forced to work in a Nike sweatshop? Will become a committed Marxist and come home determined to spread Communist revolution in her condo complex?

Better, and actually somewhat plausible: Will she discover that Dr. Jeff is living comfortably in a foreign medical staff compound, is totally startled to see Mary, and when she starts describing how she was brought there by a powerful dream, begins backing away in wide-eyed terror?

In other news, I think it would be funny if Toby were serious about her New Year’s resolution. It’s a little-known fact that last year she helped negotiate an end to Nepal’s Maoist insurgency; this year she has her sights set on just settlements in Sri Lanka and Nagorno-Karabakh. But Mary doesn’t care about that kind of do-gooding nonsense, as she’s made clear in the past; she just needs a damn date to the damn Bum Boat.

B.C., 1/8/07

Johnny, diarrhea jokes make Baby Jesus cry.

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Mark Trail, 11/21/06

If there’s one thing we can count on in this crazy mixed-up world, it’s the deep satisfaction that comes from seeing Mark Trail punch an armed man in the face. Man, that’s good stuff. Note that Mark’s raw power is enough to not only blast Snake into the next panel, but to change his shirt from blue to orange and blow the hair right off the sides of his head. Physics and logic are no match for a Trailian knuckle sandwich. I can’t wait to see how Jake’s sideburns and mullet will react to what he’s got coming to him. Forecasts call for heavy bold lettering for the next few days.

B.C., 11/21/06

I stared at this strip for an awful long time before I finally gave up on it. I sort of assume that any joke about “the real purpose of school busing” is somehow about the evils of the commingling of the races, but I really can’t suss that — or much of anything else — out of the “punchline.” My best guess is that it’s about having sex in the back of a school bus. The line underneath the word “learn” goes right into my soul and shatters my need for everything in this world to make some kind of sense.

Beetle Bailey, 11/21/06

See, it’s like they know computers exist, and have seen them in pictures and know how to draw them, but they’ve never actually used one, so they don’t know about their more obscure features, like the delete key.

Dennis the Menace, 11/21/06

“Or is it a good thing? Imagine if we could pay someone to take care of Dennis … someone other than us … who lived far away … far, far away …”

I’m frankly a little concerned that the Mitchells consider Dennis playing in the next yard over to be “roaming.” That strikes me as a mite overprotective. Watch out, kid, or you’ll end up in up in some kind of subterranean gulag.

Apartment 3-G, 11/21/06

OH MY GOD MOST AWESOMELY AWKWARD THANKSGIVING EVER!!! It actually seems pretty likely to me that, just to add to the discomfort, Gina will somehow invite herself over, thus ensuring that someone — or better, several someones — will be attacked with a turkey-carving implement. I wonder what disaster killed off all of these people’s families, leaving them to spend Thanksgiving with each other. I also wonder what kind of hat Margo will wear to dinner. Maybe she’ll dress up like a Pilgrim!

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B.C. and Wizard of Id, 11/3/06

Here’s a true comics fact that I find endlessly fascinating: Johnny Hart, the deranged mastermind behind B.C., is also the writer (but not the artist) for the Wizard of Id. This is interesting because B.C. is, as frequently noted here by me and others, totally deranged these days, whereas the Wizard of Id is, if not breaking any new comedic ground, actually still kind of funny. Today’s strips, both on the topic of sweet, delicious, tempting, demonic booze, illustrate the point nicely. B.C. is pretty typical of the strip’s current loopy state: the weird verbiage, convoluted but not particularly funny, the setup that’s ultimately just one character telling a joke to another, and the punchline that’s dependent on a series of odd assumptions and that seems like it might, in a parallel universe, be funny, but in this one is not. Now, a lot of you cruel bastards have taken this to mean that Hart has just lost it. But take a look at this Wizard of Id, which is itself typical of the strip’s style: blunt, dry, to the point, and actually driven by some cursory knowledge of the strip’s characters. In other words, ol’ Johnny is fully capable of working within the constraints of what makes a comic strip funny and normal; but in B.C. he’s made a conscious decision to follow his own meandering muse. Which in some ways is all the more alarming.

Apartment 3-G, 11/3/06

Meanwhile, the Story of Lu Ann’s Magical Mysterious Attic has apparently been outsourced to a Brontë sister. I’ve been all in favor the new interweaving storylines in Apartment 3-G, but we need more of Tommie teasing married men with her awkward sexuality and Margo threatening people with bodily harm and less of Lu Ann’s maybe-supernatural loft space. Yesterday we were teased into believing that this pile of bedding was someone asleep on the bed; presumably tomorrow we’ll learn that there isn’t actually anybody in the next room, but that someone has accidentally left the radio on in there and it happens to be playing Li’l Jon’s latest hit, “Hello, Anyone There? (Feat. Ying Yang Twins).”

If Alan and Eric Mills and, hell, Margo are all conspiring to drive Lu Ann insane à la Gaslight, though, all will be forgiven and then some.

Dick Tracy, 11/3/06

If you haven’t been following Dick Tracy (and really, who could blame you if you haven’t?), Dick has acquired an experimental device that can read minds. This turns out to be much, much less interesting than it sounds, as so far he’s only used it to annoy his officemates. I just wanted to point out that one of his coworkers is apparently Lara Flynn Boyle, seriously slumming in some kind of Nehru-collared shirt.

Marvin, 11/3/06

Lord alive, I hope the dog eats that baby.