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Gil Thorp, 10/24/09

So it turns out that all imprisoned-brother-haunted ticking time bomb Duncan Daley needed to do to find emotional support was to let his idiot friends in on his little secret! Hopefully I’m not offending any current or future high school jocks by questioning how willing and eager Shep and Robb (or perhaps two other interchangeable friends with stupid names) are to help, as this isn’t a social class known for its nurturing attitudes. Even Ted Peare’s teammates pretended that he was infected with a deadly disease when they found out he was homeless!

Anyway, with the Mudlark locker room softened by this outbreak of drama-killing, touchy-feeling emotional support, we have only one place left to turn for hard-hitting narrative action: prison! Let’s hope that we just gloss over the rest of Milford’s undoubtedly doomed football season and just focus on the shankings.

Barney Googe and Snuffy Smith, 10/24/09

Good lord, now we know why the malformed child known only as “Tater” has remained an infant throughout this strip’s multi-decade run: Loweezy has been forced by rural poverty to birth a whole series of little Taters and hand them over to the greedy Silas, who as the owner of the General Store is the only resident of Hootin’ Holler who participates at all in the national non-barter-based economy, and to whom the Smif clan is presumably heavily indebted. We can only hope that this sinister shopkeep is selling the babies to parents so desperate to adopt that they won’t question too closely the size of the gene pool that spawned them, as the other possibilities are even more terrifying.

(Side note: Showing the limits of the modern information age, the name of Snuffy Smith’s store owner character is one of the no doubt many bits of data that cannot be easily found with a quick Google search. I had to find it the old-fashioned way: looking through the archives until I found a strip where one of the other characters addressed him by name. My God, it was like living in 1997!)

(UPDATE: Uh, yeah, as several posters have pointed out, Silas’s name is in fact right there in the strip. Of more interest however is the person who mentioned that his name is also in the Snuffy Smith Wikipedia article. I had of course consulted Wikipedia on this important subject, but had looked up the feature under its official name, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, which does not include this vital data. Why on earth are there two articles on this subject? Oh, there’s an angry merge template going up on those articles tomorrow, believe you me.)

Family Circus, 10/24/09

I’m not sure what’s more unsettling: that Jeffy can’t determine the relative ages of the people he sees on the TV, or that he can’t differentiate between displays of maternal and romantic affection. For his sake, I’m hoping that his horrified parents will realize what he’s watching and ratchet the V-chip protection levels on this TV set up so high that the only thing it will get is the Weather Channel.

Ziggy, 10/25/09

Ziggy is using a slight variation on the ancient “they asked for a number to call in case of emergency, so I wrote ‘911’” joke to draw attention away from the fact that nobody on Earth would lose a moment’s sleep if he were hospitalized or dead.

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Marmaduke, 10/21/09

As you may have noticed, many comics are earnestly pushing a pro-volunteering agenda this week, with results that range from the “so irritating that even people who like volunteering will come to view it with scorn” (Luann) to “so cynical that they seem to be actually making fun of the very concept of helping one’s fellow citizens” (Archie, Wizard of Id). Probably the best of the lot is today’s Marmaduke, in which the titular hell-beast takes some time out from burying the bones of his victims to help his serial killer neighbor prep some backyard graves.

Mark Trail, 10/21/09

You know, Mark Trail has always been kind of David Lynchian, but things seems to be accelerating this week. I missed it Monday when a word balloon clearly containing dialogue for Bob emerged from the head of Mr. Sinister Sideburns; today, the same phenomenon recurs. Is Rusty just passing the time in the swamp by practicing his ventriloquism? Is “Rusty” just one Mark’s many personalities, and panel one a brief hint of the real world of Mark Trail, in which an isolated man spends days nattering on to nobody in particular? Or is the whole universe of the strip simply collapsing, with the very identities of the various characters becoming increasingly fluid as their reality dissolves into nothingness? The last possibility would explain the ominous, world-consuming mist pooling around Mark and Rusty’s feet in the final panel.

Cathy, 10/21/09

To Westerners, one of the most striking aspects of Hindu deities is that they are portrayed with more than the usual complement of limbs. Now, most Hindus do not in fact believe that, say, Vishnu is a blue-skinned man with four arms; rather, since arms and hands are the methods that humans use to impose their will on the world, the depiction of Vishnu as four-armed represents his power, which is beyond that of mortals. The characters in Cathy are also occasionally portrayed with many arms, and by analogy I have always taken this to be metaphorical, generally representing their flailing, desperate, and ultimately fruitless attempts to control themselves or the world around them. Today, however, we learn that they are in fact literally becoming monstrous, tentacled hell-beasts — and frankly not a minute to soon when it comes to piquing my interest in future developments in this feature.

Gil Thorp, 10/21/09

So Duncan Daley has spent this fall storyline by turns refusing to drink, brooding manfully, and injuring his fellow football players in uncontrollable bursts of rage. And today, the big reveal: he’s doing it all because his brother’s in prison, which makes total sense. “Gah, I told Danny I’d be in jail in time to celebrate his birthday with him! How many people do I have to maim before they lock me up?”

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Gil Thorp, 10/15/09

Let’s give some credit where credit is due: Good on Marty Moon, for hauling himself out of the gutter! It wasn’t easy, being fired from his own public access cable show, but it’s only a few weeks into the season and he’s already graduated from his broadcast-quality wooden box to television, or at least something that requires cameras of some sort. (Maybe he has a YouTube channel now?) Or, well, at least I think that weird blob at the middle left of the first panel, hovering just above the nameless Mudlark gingerly checking for head injuries, is supposed to be a camera. If it isn’t, why are Gil and Marty looking at some off-panel third party in panel two, rather than at each other? I suppose that could just be because of their seething mutual disdain, but why does Marty appear to be wearing some sort of toupee? You don’t need a hairpiece for the radio.

Mary Worth, 10/15/09

Oh my goodness, what secret bedside task must Dr. Jeff perform to resolve this tragic drama? Will he:

• Gruffly demand that Scott not die because “God damn it, someone has to marry Adrian! I’m tired of seeing her mopey face and dumb bowl cut every day!”
• Tearfully beg Scott to admit that “your father talked about me, right? He knew that he meant the world to me? That I never forgot him? Please, I need to know!”
• Use the magical healing powers he learned in “medical school,” which no other employee of this hospital attended.
• Ever so gently lift Scott into his arms, so that he can reach underneath him and feel around for his wallet.

Pluggers, 10/15/09

Why, it’s day one of entries from a new generation of tech-savvy pluggers! Today we learn that such pluggers wake up screaming every night, haunted by visions of fiery atomic death.