A few days ago, we saw Patty get slapped around by her husband for the simple crime of letting a filthy, disease-ridden deer wander around in their house, pooping everywhere. I couldn’t bring myself to make a funny about domestic violence at the time, but I knew that Mark would eventually be called upon to deliver the righteous punches to Patty’s cruel spouse. And yet today, we see that Mark is in fact equally heartless, though the blows he lands won’t leave marks. “Say, I think it would be interesting to write an article about how bringing wild animals into your house is a terrible idea, for you and the animal! Let’s go take an extensive series of pictures of our idiot friend who did just that, and then run them in the article, with big captions that say ‘MORON’ and ‘ANIMAL ABUSER’! We won’t tell her what the article’s about until it’s published. I’m sure her husband will react positively to seeing her foolishness in print for everyone to see!” It’s about time this strip took on the power-hungry liberal media, represented by Mark Trail, who will stop at nothing to get his pointless stories for his stupid magazine read by nobody.
Gil Thorp, 1/24/09
I was in a creative writing class my senior year of college, and one of the my classmates wrote a story about a girl who was always looking in her bedroom mirror and thinking she was fat, and eventually she developed an eating disorder and died, and afterwards her mother realized that the mirror was bowed outward a bit in the middle, making her look fatter than she really was. We were not kind to that story when it came time for the peer review; and yet, when I moved out of my tiny studio apartment that summer, I discovered that my only full length mirror was in fact bowed outward just as the story described, and while I had not become a desperate bulimic or anything, I had been worried about what I perceived as my encroaching portliness.
My point is that young people are dumb and that this scheme, in which a perfectly healthy Bryce will be flimflammed into trying out for the basketball team against his wishes with Photoshop trickery, is actually halfway plausible. Bryce’s sister just wants him to join the team to make friends and get out of his funk, but I hope she’s happy when he commits himself to a grueling 18-hour-a-day workout schedule and limits his daily meals to a few pieces of diet bread. After he drops dead of starvation in mid-layup, his life story will be dramatized as the made-for-TV film Please, Bryce, Eat! presented as a special event on local public access cable, hosted by Marty Moon.
Dennis the Menace, 1/24/09
Good lord, look at Mr. Wilson’s pants — they’re obviously designed for a man at least six inches taller than he is now. The poor bastard isn’t sad about Dennis’s sub-menacing chicanery; he’s obviously realized that he’s shrinking rapidly, and will soon be no taller than his irritating houseguest, only to subsequently vanish altogether.
For reasons that I cannot explain, terrible hillbilly stereotype Snuffy Smith and his kin have been popping up more frequently than usual here of late. Thus, I suppose it’s appropriate to preface this week’s COTW with a couple of interesting bits of Snuffiana from readers. First up is the title sequence from the (hopefully short-lived) Snuffy Smith animated cartoon, in which the title character lets loose a series of squawks that will haunt your dreams:
When you hear “Aw Aw AWWW” in your head over and over again for the next six to eight weeks, you can thank faithful reader Muffaroo.
Since surely that’s only whetted your appetite for all things Snuffy, I now present to you, thanks to faithful reader Jeff and the good folks at Archive.org, the first Snuffy Smith full-length film, 1942’s Private Snuffy Smith, in which our hero joins the army to defeat the forces of Fascism and make the world safe for democracy escape the revenuers.
Even the comely she-rustic in the first scene couldn’t get me through more than five minutes of this, but perhaps you’ll have more stamina. Sadly, Archive.org has not archived this film’s sequel, the awesomely titled Hillbilly Blitzkrieg.
Also, in non-Snuffy Smith news, faithful reader Proco was kind enough to send some scans from The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art, a 1974 book he picked up at a used book sale. Please enjoy this 1959 strip, in which Mary Worth smugly enjoys the debasement of her defeated enemy Connie, only to stiffen in shock when the woman tries to touch her.
And now, with all that out of the way: the COMMENT OF THE WEEK!
“Do you think Mark even knows that he’s married? Maybe he’s holding out hope that Cherry, like most of the other visitors in his home, will eventually regain her strength and find her way back to her natural habitat. That look in the last panel seems to say ‘Oh, no! That one’s still here! And her scent is beginning to attract others of her species.'” –One-Eyed Wolfdog
And the runners up:
“So the moral of this years Curtis Kwanzaa fable is ‘if you don’t want to vomit three-eyed frogs, be sure to feed cheese to the tree stump.’ It’s like Aesop, if he’d suffered a catastrophic head wound and developed aphasia.” –fillmoreeast
“A chair with a purse perched atop it screams ‘Bachelor’ to Margo? That may explain why she’s still unmarried. And I don’t mean because furniture shouts at her, although that’s also not a bad explanation for a lot of things about Margo.” –DaveyK
Spider-Man: “No Electro! Don’t Electrocute me! And no, Murdero! Don’t Murder me! But as for you, Fellatio…” –lettuce
“Oh, Harry. These kids are in Funky Winkerbean. They know they’re not invulnerable to anything.” –Just Me
“Man, that Frank Griffin sure doesn’t give a lot, does he? The absolute farthest he is willing to go is ‘I didn’t want Greg to die.’ ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Lynn. I didn’t necessarily specifically wish for your only friend to die horribly per se. I would have been perfectly content to see him, say, imprisoned or shot into space.'” –Violet
“I do have to applaud Moy for making Frank such a cartoonishly horrible person that we cheer for Mary and her meddling, life-wrecking ways. That’s art, man.” –Zaq
“Reference to Hootin’ Holler + reference to Mark and bestiality + owl’s knowing look = Kruegeresque nightmares lasting well into the spring.” –Patrick
“Sam Driver, the Deepak Chopra of total emotional insensitivity, is giving us a master class in numbness right there in panel 3. ‘Yeah, yeah … face, knife … uh-huh … sounds rough … Say, is there a Jamba Juice around here?'” –Joe Blevins
“What? Mark Trail isn’t written and directed by David Lynch? Then what’s with the weird perspective, the improbable plot twists, the lack of coherent narrative, the leeringly evil mustachioed villains, the wooden and emotionally castrated protagonist, the goofy old men proffering incomprehensible wisdom, the talking animals, and the inscrutable floating Jack Elrod ball? Oh — and the misshapen, lumpen-headed children!?!” –Comrade Denny
“I still think Patty has pubic lice. And if she thinks Mark and Cherry will be any help, she’s crazy. They are both hairless below the neckline, and their blood is pale green and fatal to inverts. That’s why Mark never has to worry about ticks.” –Poteet
“If that box contains a Tiffany engagement ring, it’s the biggest one known to man. Hopefully Eric will hire a sherpa to accompany Margo everywhere and support her bejeweled hand.” –left of the pyle
“Tess’s geometric earlobes match her planar mono-tooth. If I weren’t a real person, I’d totally date her. She’s the most perfect creature ever to escape from 2-dimensional Euclidean space.” –Squid Vicious
“I don’t follow Mark Trail except when it’s posted here, so I may have missed something, but what the hell happened to that kid who looked like Howdy Doody: The Dark Side? Rusty, I think his name was. Did he just wander off into the woods and die? Did Andy eat him? Did our hero chalk it up to natural selection because the kid’s hair wasn’t glossy and rigid enough for the standards of the Lost Forest?” –Calvinball Forever!
“Even more lovable than the baby blue smocks is the featureless subway car and the utterly blank station sign. It’s as if to say, ‘Downtown 4 Express Train to Nowhere, Nowhere At All. Much like all of your careers. And your acrid marriage, Leroy.'” –teddytoad
“I think Lois’ meeting is with the local community theater group … judging from her hat, she’s playing the role of ‘Nipple #2.'” –thehollis
If you have voted with tip jar cash, I thank and salute you! And great balls of fire, our advertisers are bodacious:
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You may have noticed that I haven’t really commented on Gil Thorp lately; that’s because this storyline, which began with Nut Boy and armed robbery, has turned out to be total snoresville ever since. Today’s strip is noteworthy, though, in that it contains shocking images of Gil Thorp engaging in coaching — not in the usual sense of him holding a clipboard and collecting a paycheck in the general vicinity of high school athletics, but actually attempting to help a member of his basketball team with his play. Gil’s advice — “relax, you’ll be fine, and everyone else we have sucks even worse than you” — leaves a bit to be desired, I suppose, but it’s a start.
Meanwhile, the thirty-first participant in Brenda’s all-weekend sexathon has arrived.
Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/10/09
What I’m learning from this Rex Morgan storyline — in which the bored, angry passengers on this strike-stricken death boat are constantly demanding that somebody, anybody pour them a drink — is that the only thing stopping most cruise ships from degenerating into vomit-covered bacchanals are crewmembers trained in the fine art of cutting the lushes off gently. Hope for the livers of all involved has arrived in the form of this friendly off-duty bartender, who probably recognizes the symptoms of alcohol poisoning when he sees them and will start watering the drinks down accordingly. (As a side note, you may think it odd that a bartender would consider a navy blue suit and sharp red tie to be cruisewear, but one of the guys who bartended my wedding was an investment banker, so you never know.)
Lockhorns, 1/10/09
I must admit that I’m charmed by the evocative setting of today’s Lockhorns. Leroy and his nameless, emotionally numb companion are just alighting from the commuter train, heading into work on a chilly morning, carrying their briefcases and coffees. We’ve never really learned what Leroy does for a living; whatever it is, it apparently requires that he wear a baby blue smock for some reason.
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/10/09
Snuffy Smith makes yet another acknowledgement of modern televised entertainment; however, this reference serves only to set up the main joke, which is that Hootin’ Holler’s sole religious institution apparently exists primarily to personally enrich its so-called “parson,” who cheerfully admits as much to one of the community’s most notorious lawbreakers.
Pluggers, 1/10/09
Pluggers redirect their suppressed sexual feelings towards their enormous, gas-guzzling cars.
