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Mary Worth, 4/7/10

Sweet Christ, if the sight of Mary grunting out the words “FINAL PARTING” through clenched teeth as she snips off the head of that flower doesn’t chill you to your very core, then you’re a much, much braver soul than I am. “Why wouldn’t her husband talk? He was quiet! Too quiet! Quiet people get their [snip] fingers [snip] cut [snip] off!”

Apartment 3-G, 4/7/10

For a while now people have been trying to figure out who the least essential person in this storyline is, since he or she will clearly the one who’ll end up on the business end of Bobbie’s gun. Most of the characters in the story are regulars or semi-regulars and it would be shocking to off them — but what if Bobbie plans to end her marriage by shooting herself? Having decided that her pill-addled life isn’t worth living, she can at least feel sure that the ghastly sight of a hallway decorated with her brains will traumatize Martin and Gabriella so much that they’ll never be able feel comfortable together again, knowing the consequences of what they’ve done. What she hadn’t counted on was the presence of Margo, whose inability to feel human emotions will throw a monkey wrench into her melodramatic suicide plans. Who could bear to end it all under Margo’s sneering, disdainful gaze? I’d be too ashamed.

Beetle Bailey, 4/7/10

There’s something about Miss Buxley’s expression in the final panel that I actually find quite poignant. She most definitely did not sign up to participate in the Halftracks’ spectacularly dysfunctional marital dynamic. The general’s ham-handed sexual advances are probably preferable.

Family Circus, 4/7/10

I’m pretty sure the last few Family Circuses have been straight-up re-runs, given some subtle differences in the art, so I’m assuming that this one is from the feature’s brief “experimental” period in the ’70s, when it eschewed jokes and humor of any kind and went for mundane slice-of-life realism. Yup! Egg salad again! Ha ha … huh … eh.

If I had to guess as to what in God’s name this is about, I’d say, based on some kind of half-remembered material floating around in my midbrain, that, back when only men worked and all women stayed home to keep house (i.e., in the ’50s, on television) and wives made their husbands’ lunches before said husbands headed off to the office, there was this cliché/running joke where said husbands would open up said lunches at work and, whaddya know, egg salad again! Isn’t that just like a woman, to make me a lunch that I don’t appreciate! And see, it’s like Billy’s gone into “the office,” which is school, and see, his lunch is … oh, hell, even assuming all these suppositions are true, it still isn’t funny. What I really want to know is this: Billy has a sandwich in his lap. Billy’s friend is holding a sandwich. WHERE THE HELL DID THAT OTHER SANDWICH COME FROM?

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Mark Trail, 4/3/10

Man, Moe and Joe Parker are really working overtime to prove that they are in fact the greatest comedy duo in the business today. They’re interrupted in the midst of ruminating business-wise on the complex reality of being cogs in the illegal wildlife meat supply chain when they spot a guy with a camera, causing them to burst out with possibly the most hilarious exclamation ever committed to newsprint: “HEY, IT’S THAT GUY WITH A CAMERA!” Sorry, Mark, it doesn’t matter if you switch up the camera you’re using — so long as you’re that guy, and you’ve got a camera you’re toting around with you, you’re that guy with a camera, and the Parker Brothers have your number.

Also, the Parkers are apparently so dumb that they can at any given time hold in their memory only the most recent incident of fisticuffs or near-fisticuffs that their family was involved in; otherwise they’d identify Mark not as “that guy with a camera” but rather “that guy we held back while we kicked that senator’s ass.” Of course, Mark didn’t have a camera back then, which is probably why they don’t recognize him.

Beetle Bailey, 4/3/10

Today’s Beetle Bailey demonstrates how tricky it can be to reconcile the rhythm necessary for snappy marital hate-repartee onto the need to have some visual variety in your comic strip. Obviously, if both panels in today’s strip took place in the doctor’s waiting room, we’d be denied that lovingly detailed and charming drawn depiction of the Halftracks’ car; but the chronology established by the scene shift creates a weird gap between Mrs. Halftrack’s cruel zingers. It’s possible that the General is still kind of stunned from learning that he needs major surgery, and so his wife is having to make her insults less and less subtle in order to get through to him:

GENERAL HALFTRACK: The doctor says I need a hip replacement!
MRS. HALFTRACK: That’s a good start.
[Five minutes later, as they drive home]
MRS. HALFTRACK: I can think of a lot of other parts that need replacing.
[Half an hour later, as they sit and watch TV]
MRS. HALFTRACK: I’m talking about your dick, and your face. Both of those. I wish you had new ones.

Mary Worth, 4/3/10

Mary needs to learn that desperation is never attractive, as she uses her suddenly hulking shoulders to pin Bonnie to the spot. “Think about what I said! Talking can help! It can help me! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, LET ME MEDDLE YOU! I NEED THIS.”

Family Circus, 4/3/10

Big Daddy Keane has of course been “dyeing” inside, by degrees, for the past seven years or so. Billy’s supposed to be seven, right?

Apartment 3-G, 4/3/10

I’m reasonably sure that there were any number of incidents in Margo’s childhood that played out more or less like this.

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Gil Thorp, 3/31/10

Oh, look, it’s another Milford team failing to win a title! Yes, there’s been a championship basketball game going on while the red-hot fisticuffs happen elsewhere. The Mudlarks losing again is of course utterly unremarkable at this point — presumably the whole loss exists just to set up the drama of faithless Cassie being shunned by her teammates for abandoning them — but today’s strip manages to offer an intriguing counterpoint to the concept of the uncanny valley — the slopes of the uncanny mountain, perhaps? Panel one disturbs and unsettles with the absence of details on the crowd in the background, as it appears that a tribe of identically black-garbed faceless, hairless automata have shown up to cheer on either Milford or Tilden; but panel three shows us that more detail isn’t necessarily any better, as we are confronted with more of Marty Moon than we ever wanted — the shine of his greasy goatee, the hollowness of his cheekbones, his glassy eyes, each and every one of his molars. We can practically smell his breath (Mr. Boston gin mingled with coffee from the AM/PM, not quite masked by the cloud of Axe Body Spray that hovers around him at all times).

Family Circus, 3/31/10

Ha ha, yes, this is a cartoon about how having four kids and a husband who doesn’t know how to iron would lead any woman to murder, but the thing I find most interesting is the fact that Billy is apparently dressed in a nice shirt and tie, for some reason. Perhaps Mommy can fashion Big Daddy Keane’s mushy, vaguely bunny-fur-like shirt into a makeshift rabbit costume and send him to school in it, and neatly dressed Billy can go into the office. Both problems solved, and we can move on to the question of why Dolly is attempting to brush her hair into the soup.

Herb and Jamaal, 3/31/10

It appears that Jamaal hasn’t quite gotten this “cruising for anonymous gay sex” thing down yet.