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Mary Worth, 7/27/09

Faithful reader Baka Gaijin has been agitating for folks to come up with a nickname that will forever serve as a shorthand for this Mary Worth plotline; I’m always hesitant to prematurely elevate any plot to Aldomania status, but today’s first panel, in which Charley lunges forward ravenously as his purple-jumpsuited lust-object-of-the-moment hesitates coquettishly on the threshold of his badly decorated apartment, goes a long way towards convincing me. I have no idea why he’s assuming this particular position — presumably one of his previous conquests told him that his chin and his chest were his best features, so he always tries to lead with them, and damn the consequences to his posture. Also of note is the bizarre perspective in this panel; it’s as if we’re watching our lovebirds through a camera mounted on Charley’s ceiling. That’s probably because we are watching them through a camera mounted on Charley’s ceiling, and the whole sordid coupling will be uploaded to CharleysLoveDen.com in short order.

Meanwhile, in panel two we get a hilarious view of Delilah crossing her fingers behind her back. Because everyone knows that if you keep your fingers crossed as you methodically work your way through the Kama Sutra with some dude who isn’t your husband, it isn’t really cheating.

Judge Parker, 7/27/09

But hey, Lawrence, even though seeing your wife making a pass at stripey-shirted Charley may make you question her judgement, look at this way — at least he isn’t, you know, a horse.

Gil Thorp, 7/27/09

OH MY GOD GIL THORP’S STALKER IS … uh … this guy? Whom Gil apparently recognizes (‘You?”), meaning that he’s probably a beloved character from the past, but maybe from before the current artist took over, which is why none of us can recognize him? And even when we’re talking about characters drawn by the same artist, it’s kind of hard to tell all the teenagers apart? See, Gil Thorp team, there’s a reason your characters are referred to as something like “five foot eight left guard Dan Grabowski” the first twelve times they appear in the strip. On plus side, though, this strip does present us with the image of Coach Kaz pedaling up the street all stealthy-like on his silent ninja-bike (a low-rider? maybe? please?), which is deeply pleasing to me.

Apartment 3-G, 7/27/09

Oh, I can see where this is going: Eric refused to put on his hat to protect his ears from the frigid Himalayan air and caught his death of cold, just like my mother always warned. Fortunately the young lama has his magical Buddha powers to protect him.

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Dennis the Menace, 7/25/09

It’s possible that Dennis simply lacks the intellectual capacity to be particularly menacing. Certainly the way he and Joey are looking at that shoe, with a sort of earnest puzzlement, doesn’t really speak well of their brainpower. “Hmm, can we eat it? Only one way to find out!”

Gil Thorp, 7/25/09

There’s something wholly unbelievable about this cartoon. It’s not that Coach Kaz has rounded up some no doubt wholly innocent young man after 48 hours of “detective” work, and it’s not that he’s delivered the kid by the scruff of his neck to Gil, with the expectation that swift justice will be dished out in the form of a vicious beating; that all makes total sense. But I refuse to believe that alpha jock couple Gil and Mimi spend their lazy summer afternoons playing chess like a couple of poindexters.

Dick Tracy, 7/25/09

Dick Tracy’s look of intense bug-eyed excitement in the final panel tells it all: though he knows that it’s important to represent himself as a feeling human with at least a tiny glimmer of empathy, any scene where corpses tumble through the air is exactly the sort of thing that he likes the looks of.

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Gil Thorp, 7/23/09

There’s a song that’s traditionally sung at the Passover seder called “Dayenu,” a Hebrew word that means, roughly, “It would have been enough.” The thrust of the song is that, during the whole fleeing-from-Egypt thing captured so memorably on film by Cecil B. DeMille and Charlton Heston, God did any number of classy things for the ancient Israelites (smiting the Egyptians, parting the Red Sea, establishing a law code in easy-to-carry stone tablet form, etc.), of which any one would have been plenty good for most people; after each verse, in which one of said divine acts is described, everyone shouts “Dayenu!”

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that we may never get to the promised land of classic Gil Thorp summer wackiness (and the so-far snoresville B-plot about hobo Ted Pearse and the Uninterested News Bears doesn’t raise my hopes), but no matter how it turns out, we’ll always have today’s glimpse into Coach Kaz’s Pier-1-Orientalism-ariffic living room to remember fondly. Is the man some sort of secret martial arts master, running his own dojo out of whatever shabby one-bedroom apartment he can afford on an assistant high school coach’s salary? Or does he just really like having a bunch of random Asian crap scattered around his love pad? You know, when I first saw that hanging gong thing, I thought for a minute that it was a framed record album, and that his rap-metal single “Playdowns (Next Year For Sure)” had finally gone platinum, which, you have to admit, makes exactly as much sense as whatever’s going on here.

Not to be neglected in the midst of Coack Kaz’s unsettling decor are his unsettlingly ripped shoulder muscles. Fortunately, Kaz knows that ordinary humans would be intimidated and terrified by his rockin’ body if they saw it without being adequately prepared, so in panel two he’s thrown on a Hawaiian shirt that covers up the guns and illustrates how fun and relaxed he is.

Dick Tracy, 7/23/09

Despite being quintessentially American in subject matter and politics, Dick Tracy is always on the verge of becoming some kind of Weimar-era expressionist film in tone and presentation, and the current plotline, in which Tracy’s daughter Bonnie Braids (really!) insists on taking her parents to the circus, is no exception; one assumes that “Here’s where the clown fires into the air and a surprise falls out of the sky” sounded less stilted in the original German. And anyone who finds clowns even slightly unsettling will be seeing panel two, in which a grim-faced, dead-eyed specimen cocks his gaily painted musket at the ready, in their dreams for weeks to come.

Mark Trail, 7/23/09

The orange-clad Mark Trail assassin in the current storyline may not be the brightest guy in the world, but I have to say that I like his style. There’s something that might tip off the cops to his identity? YOU BETTER BELIEVE HE’S GONNA SET THAT SHIT ON FIRE! I can’t wait to see what he does when he realizes he left a witness to his latest crime alive; we’ll see if Mark’s extremely wooden speech style means that he’s actually made of wood, and thus particularly flammable.

Family Circus, 7/23/09

And with that, the printed material allowed inside the Keane Kompound was further limited; now only the Bible and issues of Reader’s Digest published before 1989 would be permitted.

UPDATE: Oh my goodness, I almost forgot to add: BID ON this Ziggy cake pan on eBay! It appears that any cake made in this pan will more closely resemble E.T. than Ziggy, but whatever. ONLY FOUR HOURS LEFT!