Post Content

Mary Worth, 1/13/15

Tobey often exists in this strip as someone to half-listen all glassy eyed to Mary’s expository gossip-blather, but she sure seems interested in the elder-loving goings on around Charterstone today! Maybe it’s recently occurred to her that Ian, the December to her May, is likely to leave her a widow at a young age after rage-stroking out. “Gee, Hanna found a boyfriend over at the nursing home, and she’s almost as old as he is! If I go sashaying over there when I’m, say, 55, I’ll have my pick!”

Mark Trail, 1/13/15

Is whacking a gator on the neck with a big stick an approved method of scaring it away? Sure, why the heck not. Mark has taken his time and picked up the villain’s gun quite a ways away from where the gator is, so I’m assuming that his nemesis was in fact eaten yesterday and this is some kind of advanced alligator Heimlich maneuver. He’ll be “help[ing] him out” of the beast’s gullet, presumably significantly worse for wear.

Dennis the Menace, 1/13/15

OK, I’ll admit it: the sight of Dennis and Joey leaning back in intense intestinal distress is completely delightful and funny and poignant to me, at all once. There are few things more menacing to your sense of ease than discovering that your appetites can actually outpace the capacities of your body.

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 1/12/15

There’s been a definite and sad decline in the number of Marty Moon plotlines in Gil Thorp lately, which is really too bad because he’s an amazing character who’s engaged in lots of fun hijinks over the years. Like the time he got grifted at golf by a Ben Franklin lookalike and ended up passing out drunk in his car, or when he had a public access TV show dedicated entirely to talking smack about Gil but then his bosses got tired of his routine and replaced him with a pair of dumb teens. He even once pretended to be a kid’s dad, in order to trick Social Services into believing that kid had a stable home life! But lately he’s been reduced to asking Gil occasional pointed questions and doing his play-by-play from a inside a wooden packing crate. So I’m excited about Gil warning his naive young player about Marty’s unscrupulous journalistic practices, because hopefully that means we’re going to be treated to some actual unscrupulous journalistic practices, or at least Gil rousting himself from his usual ennui to yell at Marty Moon for perceived transgressions.

Mark Trail, 1/12/15

Just based on this strip you might think this alligator attacking Bald Ponytail False Flag Ecoterrorist is some kind of coincidence, but in fact Mark spent most of last week carefully luring this villain to an “alligator mound,” which I guess is a mound that … alligators … live … in or near, or something, and as someone who gets most of his nature info from Mark Trail, I’m going to go ahead and believe this is a Real Thing. Anyhoo, I’m a little disappointed that our baddie has turned into a stiff, expressionless Ken doll at the moment the beautiful and violent alligator lunges at him, but I am quite charmed by the evocative final panel, as his useless pistol falls to the earth while he’s presumably being devoured off-panel.

Apartment 3-G, 1/12/15

There was a point, early in this blog, where I used to do some jokes about how Margo loves cocaine. It never really became that much of a running bit, but, just for the record, she still really loves cocaine.

Heathcliff, 1/12/15

If being rolled up into a giant Wicker Man-style effigy made out of snow and worshipped like a god by mice is wrong, then Heathcliff doesn’t want to be right.

Post Content

Apartment 3-G, 1/11/15

You know, all week I’ve sort of felt the urge to feature Apartment 3-G to update you on the doings therein, but no individual strip has struck me as interesting enough to feature on the blog. Fortunately, the strip has a longstanding policy where they spend Sunday rehashing the week’s developments! So, it’s like this: Sam told Margo at lunch that Margo’s mom is under the sway of some psychic lady who is interfering with wedding plans, and then Margo left lunch and almost fell in front of a car, but then some mysterious gentleman stranger who somehow knows her name saved her! Is he part of the league of psychics who have their claws in Gabriella? Is this some indication that Margo really is the center of the universe and her whole reality is an elaborately constructed Truman Show-style simulacrum? Probably not, and the actual answer will be a million times more boring than either of these possibilities, but the last storyline in this strip involved Tommie and some other lady talking to each other endlessly about a usually off-panel baby deer and an even more usually off-panel emotionally withholding large-animal vet, so it can’t possibly be duller than that.

Mark Trail, 1/11/15

You know what’s not dull at all is today’s Mark Trail Teaches You About Nature installment. Horrible cannibal fishes distract each other so they can eat each other’s babies! You drag each and every one of these monsters out of the water and leave the lake to good-hearted, God-fearing organisms like kelp, Rusty.