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Mark Trail, 3/11/07

Holy smokes, this is one of the bestest “Mark Trail Teaches You About Nature And Crap” Sunday Mark Trails ever! None of the usual “Aren’t animals interesting/endangered/cute” nonsense today; instead, we get a crazed gang of killer elephants, harassing a pair of fleeing stereotypically garbed natives, flinging some red-shirted white dude across the savannah, and molesting a field of innocent sweet potatoes like so many 15,000-pound gophers. Mark himself, who usually strolls fearlessly into the frame to narrate as his chosen beast of the week menaces the nameless extras who are clearly desperate to break into the comics, has wisely chosen to stay safely off-camera when it comes to the tusked menace that is the elephant.

I’m guessing that the strong elephantaphobic slant of today’s strip was made possible from a large check from the International Federation of Ivory Harvesting Professionals.

For Better Or For Worse, 3/11/07

Yes, the whole point of this overcontrived family drama was to make John think that his wife was shaving her nether parts in front of several of her children; and yes, it’s both horrifying and kind of shamefully funny. I mostly want to point the second panel, which would make an excellent LiveJournal icon to sit atop the phrase “Mood: Suicidal”.

The Phantom, 3/11/07

I haven’t been covering the current Sunday Phantom storyline at all, because it’s pretty dull; it has centered some kind of weird temporal anomaly that has allowed the Ghost-Who-Violates-The-Laws-Of-Physics to interact with a group of gangsters from the ’30s who have been trying to stop a thinly veiled Amelia Earhart stand-in from making an historic flight of some sort. I’m kind of intrigued by the last panel, in which the very married Big Purple Guy allows the comely aviatrix to rest a hand on his enormous left pectoral muscle; I guess his logic is, “Hey, it’s 1937, I’m not going to be married for about 50 years, so anything goes!”

(UPDATE: Thanks to several commentors who pointed out to me that “Beryl Markham” is not actually some made-up character meant to avoid a lawsuit from Amelia Earhart’s estate, but a real person who actually lived in East Africa. I never should have doubted this, as the Phantom’s devotion to authenticity is notorious. Also, time travel is real.)

Curtis, 3/11/07

I could point out that Gunk’s “balloons” look remarkably like condoms, or that while “FOOO!” is a legitimate onomatopoeia, “TWIST!”, “BEND!”, and “SHAPE!” are not. My main concern, however, is that Gunk has used his devilish Flyspeck Island powers to create living beings out of inanimate matter, only to force them to end their short lives in a mercy killing and suicide. The face-flop is a usual exaggerated Curtis response to a joke, but here I hope that our protagonist is weeping openly at the sadistic little performance he was just forced to watch.

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Doodles by Mac & Sack, 2/11/07

I had a minor obsession with Doodles by Mac & Sack in the early days of this blog, which was recently rekindled when I realized that the “Sack” half of this doodling team is one of my favorite political cartoonists. This so-called “kids” Sunday feature still centers on way too much trauma for my taste. Today, having somehow escaped the clutches of a “friendly” boa constrictor, our nameless koala hero must crawl through the acid-drenched intestines of this hideous beast before the digestive process dissolves him into nothingness.

Also, in the “Doodle Zoo”: crossing a monster and a clown? For the love of God, aren’t clowns themselves monstrous enough?

Curtis, 2/11/07

Today’s Curtis illustrates the pitfalls of not following the FBOFW route but instead just keeping your characters the same age indefinitely. Curtis’ dad has, in his socio-cultural tastes and proclivities, been depicted as a typical baby boomer, in love with Motown and funk, and implacably opposed to the “rap” “junk” beloved by his eldest son. That all worked fine when the strip debuted in 1988. Now, nearly twenty years later, Greg would be getting on a bit in years to have come of age during the Temptations’ heyday but still have eleven- and eight-year-old kids. Today, we see that his age is being stealthily advanced; now his cultural tastes were set in what looks to be the late 70s and early 80s, the age of Space Invaders and the embryonic MTV. The problem is that that’s getting perilously close to the birth of hip-hop as a widespread cultural phenomenon; in five years, we may be seeing Mr. Wilkins berate his son with “You call that ‘Compton Kaheem’ junk rap? In my day we had Grandmaster Flash and Run-DMC!” or the like.

Also, as faithful reader AtomicDog and others pointed out, the punchline here is cribbed from a classic Peanuts strip, though in that case the “nyaahs” weren’t directed at Charlie Brown by his own father, which adds a bit of an edge here.

Panels from Judge Parker, 2/11/07

The main point of Sunday’s Judge Parker involves some mysterious, sinister lady in a pillbox hat who will no doubt be featured over and over again saying close variations on the same thing this week, so instead I wanted to focus on the throwaway panels, which offered me a chuckle with their depiction of this trio of North Americans contemplating architecture. “Oh my God, that building is, like, so old! Totally awesome! I bet it’s like, older than, like, my grandma and stuff! It’s so old it doesn’t have a parking lot! Radical!”

I’m not sure how long Neddy has been wearing that beret, but I hope it results in no end of mockery for her at the hands of the Frenchies. Also, Abbey seems to have suddenly transformed into The Mullet Without A Face.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/11/07

Man, words can’t describe the look of shock and horror on Rex’s face in the second panel. I think he heard the word “hard man” and thought for a brief, terrifying moment that June was going to try to initiate sexual relations.

Meanwhile, in the living room, I’m curious as to what direction we’re going with Niki watching Weeds, which, if you don’t know, is a show that centers on a soccer mom played by Mary-Louise Parker who is secretly running a marijuana business in her perfect exurban subdivision. I foresee a number of possibilities:

• “Heh, heh, now that these losers have let me into their home, I’m going to start corrupting their kid! LOSERS!”
• “God damn, this show reminds me of my loser druggie mom and her loser druggie boyfriend. LOSERS!”
• “Hey, my mom’s in the drug trade too, but the chick on this show is attractive and well dressed rather than skanky, and her family lives in an enormous McMansion, not a filthy tenement. LOSER!”
• “Jeez, the Morgans sure have a lot of premium cable channels that show softcore ‘erotic thrillers’ after 10 p.m.”

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Curtis, 2/10/07

What a roller-coaster ride this week has been in Curtis: from Philly’s own “Compton Kaheem” to drunk, jiggling, syrup covered ladies to the fantastic dancing Nicholas Brothers to Curtis being savagely mauled by vicious dogs. I will ignore the labored and unnatural “I met … I met … we’d like you to meet” set-up so that I can question “Onion”‘s assertion that he needed to get his stomach pumped after accidentally ingesting a little Meow Mix. Cat food is bland and not very nutritious, but it certainly isn’t poisonous. I mean, I ate a whole bag of dog treats when I was a kid, and I came out fine!

What? It was an accident. Honest!

Still and all, if Curtis is killed or at least horribly disfigured by this pit bull attack, it might be adequate punishment for the horror that was “the syrup chapter.”

Mark Trail, 2/10/07

Speaking of labored and unnatural, I’m beginning to suspect that the real name of this feature is Mark Weg in Verlorenem Wald and that the dialogue is all translated on the cheap. I’m pretty baffled by the sentence “Rusty here is the main member of our family … he keeps us all in shape”; I assume it means that Rusty has near-omnipotent powers, like the little kid in the “Put them in the cornfield” episode of the Twilight Zone, and he forces Mark and Cherry to engage in their various inane adventures for his amusement and benefit. Meanwhile, “Sally, the love of my life” sounds to me like a circumlocution that allows Dan to avoid actually describing the nature of their relationship. Presumably, their prudish hosts wouldn’t allow them to share a bedroom if he said “Sally, my latest assistant grifter/sex buddy” or “Sally, a thirty-dollar-a-day hooker I met at a truck stop an hour before we got here.”

Mary Worth, 2/10/07

I like Mary’s self-righteous assertion that helping others is the exclusive province of the young and impoverished, while middle-aged types like Jeff ought to be instead carefully monitoring their investment portfolio so that he can be sure to be able to afford ever larger powerboats and thrice weekly “dates” at the Bum Boat that don’t result in any action. Still, I’m not entirely sure that 21 is the primary age for selflessness. I’d have been much more amused by Mary’s “You’re not twenty-one anymore” plea if she had discovered Jeff sucking Bud Light out of a keg tap while being held upside down by two guys named Chad and “the Gooch”.