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Archie, 11/14/13

I love that Mr. Weatherbee looks nothing but horrified in each and every panel of this strip. Right from the beginning he’s hunched over and anxious and clutching tightly onto his lapel; it’s not like he’s under any illusions that the superintendent has anything good to say about Riverdale High, after all. And yet the actual report is obviously much, much worse than even he had imagined. Sure, the final panel, in which he’s broken out into full-on panic sweats, is great, but it’s the second panel, in which he realizes that he’s only beginning to understand the meaning of terror and his mind won’t stop screaming inside his skull, is one of my favorite things in Newspaper Archie ever.

Momma, 11/14/13

Wait, did today’s strip and yesterday’s get swapped? Or are Francis and MaryLou just going to keep making Momma go out into the snow until she freezes to death for real?

Mark Trail, 11/14/13

These two panels of insect talk are preeettty boring, so just imagine how dull the two days of fly fishing we’ve mercifully skipped over must’ve been!

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Mark Trail, 11/9/13

New adventure in Mark Trail, everyone! This week we’ve seen that it’ll revolve around the most hoary Mark Trail MacGuffin — Indian artifacts, and the stealing thereof, a staple of this strip that I’ve been detailing since the very earliest days of this blog. Still, I’m enjoying the pleasingly noirish setup here: two ex-cons, one literally just hours out of prison, drinking frosty mugs of beer, discussing their Last Big Score. The sad faces and the five o’clock shadow and the hunched shoulders make for nice atmosphere and maybe we’re even getting some foreshadowing that Jared will turn away from a life of artifact-napping before it’s too late (seriously, can you really believe anyone named “Jared” would be an unredeemable hardened criminal), but personally it’s the frosty mugs of beer that I’m fixated on here. I’m all the more fixated because a colorist’s error in panel two has made Jeff’s sleeve blue instead of brown, which makes it look like Jared’s arm is twisted around at an impossible angle, all the better to slosh beer foam everywhere, I guess.

Dennis the Menace, 11/9/13

Dennis and his awful band of child thieves are going to seal Mr. Wilson’s gold teeth right out of his head.

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Mark Trail, 11/1/13

Ha ha, that’s a good one, Cherry, but we all know that Rusty doesn’t have any “friends”! Still, the story is plausible enough to satisfy Mark, who after all has managed to come home from his adventure, narrate the entire tale of that time he and a senator grappled with political corruption and then watched a man die, and then sit down to a delicious dinner of whole turkey and white globs before realizing that his beloved ward wasn’t around. Do you think it would’ve taken him this long to notice that Andy was missing? Anyway, that bear has already stumbled upon Rusty’s shallow grave and is right now disposing of the problem, and Cherry knows it’ll be easy enough to find another funny-looking orphan who’ll answer to “Rusty” if he knows what’s good for him.

Archie, 11/1/13

Yup, just another installment in the Terrible Ennui Of Living In Riverdale! “Must be nice to date the captain of the football team!” Betty says to Veronica. “Must be nice to not be inexplicably trapped in the romantic orbit of Archie Andrews, who’s mildly handsome and sort of nice and not particularly smart! God, what a couple of sad chumps we are!” But it turns out Midge finds her romantic links with Moose to be nothing but a crushing embarrassment. Love is nothing but shame!