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Mary Worth, 6/1/12

Sorry I have not been properly keeping you up to date on the Great Dawn Weston Mope-Fest of 2012, which has consisted entirely of her lying on her couch, clinging to a pillow, obsessively rewatching Game of Thrones, and mumbling things like “Life is brutal.” This has gone on for days! I know, it doesn’t sound that exciting when I describe it, but she does it with a certain verve. Anyway, Wilbur’s had about as many of these thrills as he can handle, so he’s off to his sealed Wilburtorium to make a call … a long distance call, if you know what we mean! I actually don’t know what he means, though I do know that, since Mary lives in the same condo complex, he isn’t calling her, which means he hasn’t stumbled onto the real solution to everyone’s problems yet, i.e., calling Mary Worth.

I do kind of hope that his phone call has absolutely nothing to do with his miserable daughter, who he’ll just leave on the couch whining for the foreseeable future until she decides to buck up. “Yeah, Dawn’s still not over what’s-his-face yet. ‘Life is brutal,’ blah blah blah. So, what are you wearing?”

Funky Winkerbean, 6/1/12

Wow, two primary characters in Funky Winkerbean are really excited about something happening in the lives! How do we get from here to abject misery in the fewest possible moves? Hmm, let’s say … former rivals, now best friends and stepsisters to be, suddenly find themselves competing for the lone spot on the team, with no other options and their futures on the line? Yes, that’ll do nicely.

Apartment 3-G, 6/1/12

I’m sure “We shouldn’t be having this conversation, Margo” is meant to denote that Tommie is on Team Nina, or even that she has entirely false views of the legal implications of midwife-patient confidentiality, but I kind of hope that it means something more along the lines of “We shouldn’t be having this conversation, Margo, because it is completely insane. You can’t just appoint yourself someone’s publicist against their will! And you’re not even a publicist! You’re certainly not a good publicist! I’m going to leave the room and come in again, and when I do I want to hear noises out of your mouth that are not 100% bonkers.”

Spider-Man, 6/1/12

Newspaper Spider-Man’s villains almost always become less threatening as their storyline works itself out. I was pretty worried that we’d never be able to get less menacing than yesterday’s reveal, but this is actually a pretty good start! Haha, that car has a duck on it!

Beetle Bailey, 6/1/12

You know, if Beetle Bailey decided it wanted to focus entirely on the theater of erotic bafflement from here on out, I wouldn’t object at all. It’d sure be preferable to whatever the hell it is that it’s been doing for the past 60 years or so.

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Hagar the Horrible, 5/1/12

You know, I’ve been reading Hagar the Horrible for most of my literate life, and like most people, I had always assumed that the recurring strips where Hagar and Lucky Eddie crack wise on a tiny desert island just served as a place for desert-island gags rejected by the New Yorker. It’s only at this moment — as Hagar wistfully thinks about his wife, who’s thousands of miles away, who has no idea where he is, who he’ll probably never see again — that it occurred to me to try to fit these scenes into the larger narrative of the strip. Now that this conceptual shift has taken place, here’s my first question: what happened to the rest of the crew? Did Hagar and Eddie eat them?

Six Chix, 5/1/12

When I first scanned this strip I thought it was some miracle of life nonsense, but seeing the exhausted expression on momma bird and the frankly terrified look on papa bird, my guess is the real point is that spring made these birds horny and so they had some bird-sex and forgot to use birth control. Or should that be … BIRDTH CONTROL?? Because they’re birds, you see! Ha ha! Anyway, long story short, they have a bunch of children they don’t want now.

Spider-Man, 5/1/12

Oh, man, I don’t know why I’m surprised, but MJ’s supposedly funny play is terrible. Unless maybe the quote marks around all the dialogue indicate that the cast is in on the joke about how terrible the play is, and are playing the entire thing for meta-comedic laughs at the meta-awfulness of it all? That sounds like something that would play in Brooklyn rather than on Broadway, and anyway it’s been repeatedly demonstrated that nobody in the Spider-Man newspaper strip is even a tiny bit self-aware, because if they were they would immediately stalk away in disgust.

Mark Trail, 5/1/12

Just wanted to keep you up to date with the Mark Trail action. Today’s action: a bad guy lets loose with a WHAT TH’, which is always awesome. Also, apparently Andy’s kill switch is hard to turn off! Man, look at that slavering maw in panel two! He’s got a taste for human flesh now!

Funky Winkerbean, 5/1/12

“He used to joke about it, but it’s not a joke anymore. It’s completely true! My father can’t feel any human emotion or grasp ordinary, everyday experience unless it’s mediated through a recording device of some kind. In this way, he has become the archetype of a 21st century human being.”

Beetle Bailey, 5/1/12

Hey, remember back in the ’90s when Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC made a big deal about sending General Halftrack to sensitivity training, because of his constant, actionable sexual harassment of his secretary? Well, it didn’t take

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Mark Trail, 4/18/12

OK, guys, I know that what I’m about to type will sound like pure liquid madness, but: does anyone else think that the current series of Mark Trail events actually somewhat hold together logically? I’m thinking in particular about these two boys here, who, despite their cheery bravado, are not the brightest pair of underemployed mulletheads in the county, as their decision to grow pot on government land indicates, and have arrived at this place in their life because of their inability to clearly plan out the steps they need to reach their goals. Probably a lot of brutal killings that happen in the course of the illegal narcotics trade don’t happen because someone woke up one morning hoping to become an axe murderer; it’s just that someone stumbles upon your grow operation, and he’s seen your stuff and he’s seen your faces, and, well, murder’s a big deal, you probably don’t do it right away, but you can’t let him go, and the hours pass and you can’t think of other options, and, I mean, you’ve already got the axe. It’s right there, you know?

Beetle Bailey, 4/18/12

Everything in Beetle Bailey, meanwhile, only makes sense in a unsettling fugue state of underdeveloped eroticism. Beetle and Miss Buxley are in a field, and it’s the middle of the night, and suddenly she stubs her toe. “Hug me!” she demands, and the Beetle, who’s never shown anything other than platonic interest in her, suddenly becomes a sexually aggressive bear. It’s like what Freud must have thought sex was like, when he was nine.