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Apartment 3-G, 11/24/10

Whew, thank goodness everything worked out for the best! Crazy taser lady Mrs. Bloom gets someone to look after her cat when she’s in Florida for two weeks or whatever, and all she has to do is allow an enormous piano to be stationed in her tiny Manhattan apartment indefinitely. And also Tommie’s Aunt Iris is going to live there while she’s gone, and maybe stick around after she gets back, who knows, she said in a Sunday strip that she likes to “have adventures,” and once a freewheeling adventuresome free spirit is ensconced rent-free on your couch, they’re pretty much there for the duration, if you know what I mean.

Mark Trail, 11/24/10

I worked many years as a freelancer, and I have to say that if I had been recruited by a shadowy government operative for a dangerous undercover mission, one so important that I couldn’t even fill my own wife in on the details, I wouldn’t have called up any of my clients to blab about it on an unsecured phone line. Still, it’s narratively important for Bill Ellis to hear about all this so he can blurt out everything Mark says over the phone so that in turn Kelly Welly, Mark Trail’s greatest ever recurring character, can find out about it and show up and ruin everything/make everything awesome.

You can see why Kelly might want to get out of the office, anyway, what with Bill simultaneously holding back her journalistic career and invading her personal space. Sure, the two of them might have dated a couple of times, and he taught her some techniques (so different from Mark’s!), but Kelly is obviously ready to put that chapter behind her and go screw up the Customs Department’s most ill-conceived sting operation ever.

Beetle Bailey, 11/24/10

Hey, everybody, the revolution is here, at long last! Its first target is General Halftrack. The revolution is even more misguided than I had imagined.

Archie, 11/25/10

Jughead is afraid of accidentally getting something of use out of his education; I, meanwhile, am fucking terrified of the grinning be-hatted hot dog monster that’s waving cheerily at him from the TV.

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Beetle Bailey, 11/12/10

I know I should be way, way past the point where I get discombobulated by arbitrary, contextless things happening in Beetle Bailey in order to set up a cheap laugh, but something about Donna here doesn’t strike me as right. Why does she have a “Donna” nameplate on her desk? Doesn’t the fact that Killer addresses her by name in the first panel establish her identity and adequately lay the groundwork for the hilarious URL-based punchline? Also, why is her desk empty but for a single tiny slip of paper, but she has two computers sitting uselessly on the shelf behind her? Is this to establish her “computer savvy,” since obviously anyone who knows how to create a terrifying “web-site” must be surrounded by advanced computer equipment at all times? This comic seems like what happened when the crew at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC heard the phrase “Internet dating” in passing and tried to extrapolate what that might mean without doing any further research.

One of the things that rings false about the appearance of Donna is that the Beetle Bailey is actually fairly stingy about the introduction of named characters, only bringing them in once a decade or so when some great shift in society seems to demand it. The last such character introduced was actually computer nerd Chip Gizmo, which leads me to believe that “Donna” is actually Chip in fairly impressive drag.

Judge Parker, 11/12/10

In the latest in a long series of Judge Parker storylines to focus on the problems of the wealthy and attractive, it seems that ex-Judge Parker is chafing at the confines of his extremely comfortable retirement and wants to go back to his old job of deciding who lives and who dies. But now that his son has been declared Judge Parker for Life in accordance with Spencerville law and traditions, how will he get back into the courtroom? Will he start a whisper campaign impugning his son’s heterosexuality? Or will he settle for his own syndicated judge show on daytime television, where he’ll get to berate and insult defendants unrestrained by the niceties of judicial ethics?

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Beetle Bailey, 11/4/10

The art in Beetle Bailey isn’t really “good” per se, but sometimes the characters’ faces are quite expressive in their stylized way. Today, Sarge in particular has this look of resignation slowly sliding into soul-wearing sadness, presumably due to his terribly fraught relationship with food, and I actually find it quite poignant. “Don’t mind me, I’m just going to sit here at my desk joylessly eating these indeterminate brown disks that have been sitting in my desk drawer for four hours, cramming them down my maw as I stare off into space, dying inside. See you in a few minutes! I hate myself!”

Family Circus, 11/4/10

On the other hand, the thought of Jeffy lying on the living room floor weeping ceaselessly while his mother talks on the phone and ignores him is something I find utterly hilarious.

Spider-Man, 11/4/10

Oh my goodness, Spider-Man is engaged in super-powered combat! Or at least he was, briefly, before being disabled by a swift whack to the thigh with a largish stick. “OWWW” indeed! Our hero has previously been brought low by some dude with a club, a butler with a lead pipe, and a brick, but all of those adversaries allowed him the dignity of swiftly disabling him by attacking him from behind. Mole Man, by contrast, just walked up to him and hit him in the leg. The Amazing Spider-Man!

Apartment 3-G, 11/4/10

Jokes on you, crazy taser lady! As was mentioned in passing six years ago and never explained since, the Apartment 3-G girls own your building, so you’ve just confessed your lease violation to your landlord! Tommie’s too wimpy to do anything about it, but she’s also incapable of keeping a secret from Margo — as soon as Margo makes eye contact with her, she’ll blurt out “CAT! MRS. BLOOM HAS A CAT!” — so you’d best take Prissy to Florida with you if you don’t want to find your furniture crushed into a cube and left on the curb when you get back.