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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.

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Curtis, 8/11/09

Today’s Curtis is a truly epochal event! It’s not because Barry casually implies that Michelle is some kind of sinister pagan priestess, performing voodoo rituals in her lavishly appointed apartment. Ha ha, no, that’s just standard-issue Curtis madness. And it isn’t because we catch a rare glimpse of Curtis’s head without his hat perched upon it, though that’s always intriguing. (It is kind of amusing that he’s carefully combing it into place only to cover it up with his trademark chapeau for the next 23 hours.) No, what’s really important is that this is the probably the first newspaper comic in living memory in which the punchline (or, at least, the unsettling sentence occupying the space where the punchline would normally be) is being delivered by someone who’s urinating. Since I blessedly grew up an only child, I have to ask: did any of you ever wander into the bathroom and engage in banter with your sibling, and then one of you just stone cold started peeing? Because that’s … that’s gross. It’s gross if you did that.

Mary Worth, 8/11/09

“Yes, it’s true; my lectures, while inspiring and life-affirming, tend to attract the worst kind of perverts: relationship voyeurs. Always trying to overhear sincere conversations between two beloveds, getting their rocks off on emotional intimacy … YEAH, YOU IN THE GLASSES! YEAH, I SEE YOU! SICKO! I’M NOT SIGNING YOUR BOOK NOW!”

No, but seriously, I certainly hope that this blonde lady is either a snoopy reporter about to question Lawrence about his many monstrous crimes or carrying Lawrence’s love child. Because if we’ve got four days ahead of us of Lawrence and Delilah emoting weepily in Lawrence’s hotel room about the depth and majesty of their love, after all the promise this storyline had, I will be … not so much angry as just disappointed.

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Gil Thorp, 7/31/09

I was hoping that Marty DeJong’s wrath was going to cause some actual introspection on the part of Gil on how he handles his young charges, but what with Kaz’s quick quips, I see now that these meatheads are completely incapable of self-reflection of any sort without drastic measures. So: remember how at the beginning of The Sixth Sense, Donnie Wahlberg breaks into Bruce Willis’s house and totally kills him, but he doesn’t realize it, and he’s, like, a ghost throughout the whole movie? Well, what if that’s what’s going to happen here? Marty DeJong has in fact already burned down Thorpe Manor, killing the entire Milford coaching staff. Since they very rarely interact with the student athletes they ostensibly coach, and much of the actual day-to-day coaching work is performed by random community members who wander in off the street, it may take them until the middle of basketball season to realize that they’re dead; when that moment comes, they’ll finally walk off into the light in order to reach the next plane of existence, greeted by a white-robed Clambake.

Dick Tracy, 7/31/09

“Yeah, I mean, she’s dead already, so belay that order to do anything urgent about it. We’ve all seen a dead body or twelve, am I right? I know I have. C’mon, these people paid good money for their circus tickets, on with the show! You might want to throw a blanket over her, if you can find one around somewhere; no big deal, otherwise.”

Curtis, 7/31/09

I haven’t mentioned how Curtis has been all Oedipal and creepy and weird for the last two weeks, with Curtis and his dad fighting for Diane’s attention with dueling ailments, but boy howdy has it been all Oedipal and creepy and weird. At least most of the strips have contained actual jokes, or reasonable joke substitutes; today’s strip seems to be under the impression that being Oedipal and creepy and weird qualifies as a punchline in and of itself.