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Hi and Lois, 12/5/10

It’s pretty common to see a Sunday strip where the throwaway panels ruin the rhythm of the storytelling; still, I’d like to think that what we see today is unspooling exactly as it happens. Hi just decides to ignore Lois’s initial suggestion to dine al fresco in the freezing cold, and remains deliberately obtuse even as she puts their icy picnic BBQ together. “Wait, she can’t really mean that, can she? Like, we’re eating outside? Outside outside?” Lois can endure any weather! She’s got her pink headband of warmth and safety to protect her!

Panel from Mary Worth, 12/5/10

Ah, yes, Jill isn’t just opposed to Adrian and Scott getting married; she is adamantly opposed to the very concept of marriage. Sacred union, feh! It would be vaguely daring if Jill were supposed to be some kind of radical who angrily rejects marriage as an institution, but I’m guessing in fact she just needs to learn How To Love, and Mary will be the one who teaches her. Didn’t we just have this storyline, where Dr. Mike couldn’t love until he made peace with his dying drunk vigilante dad? Yes, we did, and it was awesome, so hush your mouth and let this thing play out.

Panel from Judge Parker, 12/5/10

BREAKING: SMUG RICH ASSHOLES FROM JUDGE PARKER STILL RICH, SMUG

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Gil Thorp, 11/15/10

When Milford’s police chief says that pleasure isn’t the word he’d use, he must be referring to Gil’s pleasure, because, like a selfish lover, he appears to be deriving a great deal pleasure from this midday office encounter — smug, smug pleasure, as his little smile in panel two indicates. And why not? Every Gil Thorp plot in which one of Gil’s charges is accused of wrongdoing ends up with the poor Mudlark exonerated in completely unrealistic fashion; now we’ve got this season’s hero Cody Exner — the poor foster kid who tries so hard to be a good team captain — on video selling “dope” (which I assume in whatever decade Milford is in still refers to boring old marijuana rather than heroin or something awesome). Will Gil finally have to admit that his judgement was wrong? I mean, he shrugs off each year’s failure to win a championship with remarkable aplomb, so maybe he’ll just take the attitude that, eh, we pick two team captains every year, statistically one of them was going to be a drug dealer eventually.

Judge Parker, 11/15/10

Hey, Judge Emeritus Parker! Remember that $100,000 advance check you got? See, in the publishing industry they call it an “advance” because they’re paying you in advance for money your book hasn’t earned yet. So, you shouldn’t be getting those $850 royalty checks until your book or books have made $100,000 worth of royalty money for you, which, for a first-time author writing what I assume to be dull legal thrillers, should occur sometime around 2081. My best guess is that this check is actually money Sam found under the cushions of one of the lesser-used sofas in his vast mansion and he’s giving it to Judge Emeritus Parker in a (failed) attempt to get him to stop complaining. If it is a real royalty check and his book has miraculously already earned him a six-figure sum, whatever those initial promotional expenses cost couldn’t possibly be enough.

Mark Trail, 11/15/10

Mark Trail is the serial strip with the loosest grasp of how humans actually think, speak, and behave, so naturally it also puts the least effort into making the shift from one plotline to another seem even remotely naturalistic. “Mark, a man is waiting for you at the house! He will tell you what will happen next, to all of us!”

The Lockhorns, 11/15/10

Wow, this, coming so soon after this, implies that the Lockhorns is moving tentatively towards the third rail of Lockhorns narrative: Leroy and Loretta’s sex life. By next April, each day’s panel will find them in the midst of some depraved sexual act. They will of course still sport expressions of heavy-lidded weltschmerz and will emotionally devastate each other with cutting remarks.

Archie, 11/15/10

The horrifying vision of a nauseated Mr. Weatherbee in panel two, combined with Archie’s fries-spewing from last Saturday, leads me to believe that the AJGLU-3000 has found some particularly depraved pocket of the Internet dedicated to puke porn. “Is this what the hu-mans want to see?” the cybernetic humorist thinks to itself, whirring softly. “It seems unappealing to me, but I have no digestive tract, so who am I to say?”

Comment of the week update! Guys, I’ve decided, for scheduling reasons of my own that are really far too boring to go into here, that I’m moving the COTW post from Monday to Friday. I’m going to skip a week this week, giving Black Drazon pride of place for another five days. ENJOY YOUR EXTRA TIME AT THE TOP, O NOBLE COMMENTOR!

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Beetle Bailey, 11/12/10

I know I should be way, way past the point where I get discombobulated by arbitrary, contextless things happening in Beetle Bailey in order to set up a cheap laugh, but something about Donna here doesn’t strike me as right. Why does she have a “Donna” nameplate on her desk? Doesn’t the fact that Killer addresses her by name in the first panel establish her identity and adequately lay the groundwork for the hilarious URL-based punchline? Also, why is her desk empty but for a single tiny slip of paper, but she has two computers sitting uselessly on the shelf behind her? Is this to establish her “computer savvy,” since obviously anyone who knows how to create a terrifying “web-site” must be surrounded by advanced computer equipment at all times? This comic seems like what happened when the crew at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC heard the phrase “Internet dating” in passing and tried to extrapolate what that might mean without doing any further research.

One of the things that rings false about the appearance of Donna is that the Beetle Bailey is actually fairly stingy about the introduction of named characters, only bringing them in once a decade or so when some great shift in society seems to demand it. The last such character introduced was actually computer nerd Chip Gizmo, which leads me to believe that “Donna” is actually Chip in fairly impressive drag.

Judge Parker, 11/12/10

In the latest in a long series of Judge Parker storylines to focus on the problems of the wealthy and attractive, it seems that ex-Judge Parker is chafing at the confines of his extremely comfortable retirement and wants to go back to his old job of deciding who lives and who dies. But now that his son has been declared Judge Parker for Life in accordance with Spencerville law and traditions, how will he get back into the courtroom? Will he start a whisper campaign impugning his son’s heterosexuality? Or will he settle for his own syndicated judge show on daytime television, where he’ll get to berate and insult defendants unrestrained by the niceties of judicial ethics?