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Mark Trail, 6/10/07

Dear humankind,

“Most belligerent animals for their size in the world,” huh? All right, nobody’s gonna mistake us for a bunch of namby-pamby, let’s-all-get-along types, we’ll admit. But do you two-leggers ever think that maybe there’s a reason we’re so belligerent? Huh? Do you?

Let’s start with the food angle. You know if you’re on a road trip, you sometimes say, “Oh, I don’t want to wait to get to Nashville to have dinner, let’s eat at the Sbarro at the next rest stop”? Well, imagine if the consequences of not stopping weren’t just getting hungry and cranky, but frickin’ droppin’ dead. And then, imagine that, instead of getting a baked ziti in a plastic container that you can easily take out to your car, you have to kill and eat an undersea bug the size of your head! Probably one with stingers or something. A frickin’ bug! And once you’ve eaten it, you’ve just got to start running (or swimming) around looking for more bugs to eat.

And then there’s the way you get treated. “Oh, look, how cute, your babies have formed a shrew-chain as they desperately cling on to your tail for dear life … oops, I just crushed them all to death with my enormous freakin’ foot!” And don’t even get me started on the freakin’ cats. “Hi there snoogy snoogums! How’s my sweet fluffy girl? Did you have a nice day outside? Awww, did you bring me a prize? You did! You brought me the corpse of an innocent shrew, who never did anything in its life to hurt you! Oh, look, it doesn’t seem to have any visible wounds — you must have batted it around until its internal organs were mashed to putty! How cute! Now let me take the body away and throw it in the garbage!”

It’s this kind of demeaning attitude that leads to a prevalent anti-shrew attitude in law enforcement agencies around the world. So, yeah, belligerent? Maybe we’re a little freakin’ belligerent. But maybe we’ve got some good freakin’ motivation.

Sincerely,
The shrews

P.S. We poop in your cereal boxes, FYI.

Apartment 3-G, 6/10/07

I mainly ran this so we can all continue to enjoy Margo’s bitchtasticness. Today, we see that her reluctance to go see her dear friend one-third of the rent for her apartment in the hospital may be more than a knee-jerk Margoism; she’s obviously just gotten collagen injections in preparation for Eric’s return from wherever it is he’s jetted off to, and she probably doesn’t want to go out in public for a few more days.

I do have to say re: panel five that I am getting a little weary of everyone being so stunned to find Tommie at the hospital. “So we’re at the emergency room and OH MY GOD THERE’S TOMMIE, WHO IF WE HAD SPENT MORE THAN FIVE MINUTES TALKING TO HER THE FIRST TIME WE MET WE’D PROBABLY HAVE LEARNED THAT SHE WAS AN EMERGENCY ROOM NURSE AT THIS VERY HOSPITAL!” It’s possible that, in a desperate attempt to get people interested in her, Tommie actually tells everybody that she has a much more glamorous career, as a CIA spy or Queen of Norway or something. It’s also possible that she’s so boring that nobody ever even makes it to the typical “so what do you for a living and where do you do it” part of that first conversation.

Tommie’s shock at seeing Alan is perhaps a bit more understandable, since he long ago swore a drunken oath to leave the evil metropolis of New York and all it stood for behind. Plus, he appears to be wearing eyeliner.

Mary Worth, 6/10/07

This may be one of the most horrifying Mary Worths ever, and not just because Vera looks like one of those soul-searing Margaret Keane paintings in panel five. We’ve watched Mary slowly break Vera’s independence and will over the past few weeks. Yesterday we saw saw the catharsis that came when she completed her Worth-appointed mission. Today, the upper level of her conscious mind seems to indicate that she yearns for freedom again, but her glassy expression and final thought — return to the programmer for further instructions — tell us that she’s still in the puppet mistress’s thrall. Of course, we all know that, now that Mary has convinced Vera to do the exact opposite of what she’s wanted to do for so many years, the innocent girl holds no more appeal to the meddling biddy; once Vera returns to Charterstone, Mary will just crack open her skull and feast on her brain, then have Dawn Weston post a “sublettor wanted” ad for Vera’s apartment on Craigslist.

Panel from Cathy, 6/10/07

I try to keep everyone’s exposure to Cathy to a minimum, but I do feel this panel is worth noting, because the phrase “Someone needs to relax! Let’s assemble a backyard gazebo!” is actually kind of surreally funny out of context. I’m pretty sure if you shaved Irving’s head and put a polka-dotted mumu on him, he’d be Zippy the Pinhead.

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Crankshaft, 4/8/07

A while back, I suggested that the name of this strip be changed from Crankshaft to the somewhat wordier but more accurate Jesus Christ, Ed Crankshaft Is Such An Asshole. I now think it should be stretched out to Jesus Christ, Ed Crankshaft And All The Other People In This Strip, Who Are Associated With Him In Some Way That I’m Not Clear On Despite The Fact That I’ve Read It Daily For Years, Are All A Bunch Of Assholes. I know your mom is a difficult and crotchety old lady, but dude. I hope you didn’t tell this heartwarming little anecdote to her aide right in front of her.

Hi and Lois, 4/8/07

Meanwhile, it appears that Hi and Lois’ pastor is a dirty rotten filthy hippie. Liberals!

Mary Worth, 4/8/07

I keep hoping — and keep being dissapointed, but hope does spring eternal — that each new character that comes into this strip will finally be the one that allows the Charterstone Mafia to see themselves and evil, petty, self-absorbed individuals that they are. Sadly, we all know that Vera will submit to the will of Mary and allow herself to be meddled into self-actualization by Mary and her minions, but I’d like to believe that the sneering young man in the final panel is meant to represent us, the readers. “Wait … you don’t know? Just look at the three of you lined up there. Why wouldn’t she run?”

And a couple of one-off panels:

Panel from The Phantom, 4/8/07

Most of this week’s Sunday Phantom just treaded water after last week’s, with this well-dressed trio being hassled by the Presidential Security Dragoons, but it was all worth it to see this awesome final panel, in which one of those ubiquitous executive rolling suitcase turns out to be filled with SCARY BONES AND STUFF. One might wonder how exactly this made it through the x-ray machines that are compulsory at airports everywhere now (yes, even in Africa), though if the NEXT box is any indication, perhaps they just laughed it off by telling airport security, “Oh, it’s okay — I’m in the death trade.”

Panel from Cathy, 3/8/07

Dot-ack? Dot-ack? All right, I admit it: this is a Cathy in-joke, and I found it funny. I would be willing to petition ICANN to create a .ack top-level Internet domain, which would be dedicated to Cathy-related content.

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Cathy, 2/26/07

So. Um. Here goes:

I actually … sort of … found Cathy funny today.

I mean … not hilarious or anything, but … I actually laughed. Well, “laughed” is a strong word. Strictly speaking, I exhaled out my nose a little harder than usual. Still and all, I need help. I know it.

Apartment 3-G, 2/26/05

I didn’t cover Sunday’s Apartment 3-G, mostly because I don’t think it’s particularly cool when comics encourage kids to do drugs. But now that I’ve seen Monday’s strip, I have to say that it’s one of the more egregious instances of content recycling in recent memory:

Apartment 3-G, 2/25/07

I know that the soap opera strips have to spend Monday recapping Sunday because not everyone gets to see the Sunday strip, but this week Apartment 3-G seems to have mainly tweaked the dialogue and taken out the Margo panels. And is removing Margo from an installment of Apartment 3-G ever a good idea? No, no it is not. You could show three panels of Margo reading the newspaper and sneering at no one in particular and it would be more gripping than anything that ever happened to Tommie.

Blondie, 2/26/07

There are so many layers of insanity to this strip that I barely know how to approach it. Do the police ever ticket drivers for excessive musical volume? Does Dagwood labor under the assumption that the theme from Bondanza can never be played too loudly? Was he sitting at a stoplight, his subwoofers causing all the cars around him to vibrate, only instead of blaring Master P as God intended, he instead treated the world to that all-too-familiar “dun da duh dun da duh dun da duh dun da DAHH DAHHHH”? Still, what disturbs me the most is that somewhere out there in Blondie land, there’s a radio station dedicated to classic TV theme songs. I’ve been telling people for years that the 517 different channels available on satellite radio will eventually destroy all that’s decent about our society; maybe someone will finally listen to me now.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 2/26/07

“How it is dept.: Libertariana and Rando are sick of their taxes being used to fund city schools and parks for poor people, so they move into a condo complex that keeps the proles out. But howzat? Homeowners Associations can also force you to pay for improvements for the common good? OH YEAH!!!” I’m surprised the acknowledgment line didn’t read “Anita and Sol, Unnamed Heavily Armed Encampment, Somewhere in Montana.”