Archive: Herb and Jamaal

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Mary Worth, 3/3/14

Tommy seems to have survived an awkward dinner with Mary and Wilbur and actually come out of the experience with a hint of a smile. Those good feelings end immediately in the next panel, as his mother isn’t even six inches out the door before ditching him to go spend some quality time with Wilbur, who needs to amble around the Charterstone grounds immediately after every meal or else he won’t be able to poop for the next 48 hours. “I’ll see you later, Tommie! Wilbur quit half his job for me, so I guess I’ll let him get to second base. Enjoy hanging out in our condo unit, alone except for your prison-time PTSD and your increasingly fragile sobriety!”

Marvin, 3/3/14

Yes, this is a great plan, Marvin! Just lurk under your bed for the next decade and a half, an increasingly feral presence, nonverbal, and, of course, since this is the cause for the whole drama, covered with your own filth. Sounds like a great life!

Herb and Jamaal, 3/3/14

Herb’s mother-in-law Eula has lived a long, amazing life. Now she yearns for death!

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Apartment 3-G, 2/26/14

There’s been some suspicious chatter in the comments about the possibility that Tommie’s fiancé might not actually exist. Sure, we’ve seen him, but we also saw the mysterious ghost who forced Lu Ann to make all those crappy fern paintings, and he just turned out to be a byproduct of the carbon monoxide poisoning she developed from working in a poorly ventilated studio. Couldn’t terrible loneliness be an even more powerful spur to hallucinatory lunacy than oxygen deprivation? Tommie’s reckless food overpurchases certainly indicate a kind of panicked mania. “Yep, enough food for seven men! Of which my fiancé is definitely one! Not a figment of my imagination! Not a story that I thought nobody would ever be able to confirm or deny! A real, flesh and blood human man who wants to marry me! Ha ha! Hope you like things that come out of brightly-colored boxes!”

Mary Worth, 2/26/14

Looks like Tommy’s had a political awakening in the joint! No matter how badly he needs a job, he recoils in disgust at the thought of helping some vast megaretailer conglomerate crush the struggling mom-and-pop stores the still cling to life along Santa Royale’s scenic shopping/fish-gutting district down by the pier. Or maybe he’s just worried that his sobriety will be in trouble because the Santaroymart warehouses a den of drug depravity, if I correctly remember that the hilariously botched and laughably named drug bust “Operation H-Town” went down there.

Better Half, 2/26/14

Sure, it’ll probably set her back thousands of dollars, but when you come home and find your husband sticking his dick in your home entertainment system, you can be forgiven for reacting strongly.

Herb and Jamaal, 2/26/14

Like when there’s nobody else in the room, for instance!

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Blondie, 2/10/14

The Winter Olympics, in addition to being a stage where the greatest athletes compete at the highest level to achieve glory, is also a carefully managed corporate product with armies of lawyers. They are not to be joked about, OK? You can’t just publish in hundreds of newspapers a dumb joke about how the kids today like texting and wouldn’t it be funny if someone at the Olympics were texting while competing in their chosen event? No, that would be unthinkable. You can only have someone make that joke, then immediately acknowledge that it was just a joke, ha ha, obviously the Olympics has no such event, that would be degrading to the sport, please, tune in for primetime coverage on NBC!

Apartment 3-G, 2/10/14

Tommie’s fiancé has stopped by her apartment in New York on the way to the airport … from … England? Which makes no sense? Anyway, he’s missed his plane now, because they’re “drowsy from happiness,” which I’m assuming is some sort of code for sex that you’re allowed to use in the comics because it’s completely opaque. But now he’s missed his plane! And his head is bobbing suggestively! And he’s going to figure out that his fiancée is a crazy person who is keeping a baby deer in her New York City apartment! Everything about this whole scenario just screams “surrealistic dream narrative” to me, starting with “somebody agreed to marry Tommie.”

Herb and Jamaal, 2/10/14

Ho ho, these fellas are lost but they won’t stop and ask for directions? Men, amiright? In unrelated news, Herb has a malignant melanoma.