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Apartment 3-G, 11/24/10

Whew, thank goodness everything worked out for the best! Crazy taser lady Mrs. Bloom gets someone to look after her cat when she’s in Florida for two weeks or whatever, and all she has to do is allow an enormous piano to be stationed in her tiny Manhattan apartment indefinitely. And also Tommie’s Aunt Iris is going to live there while she’s gone, and maybe stick around after she gets back, who knows, she said in a Sunday strip that she likes to “have adventures,” and once a freewheeling adventuresome free spirit is ensconced rent-free on your couch, they’re pretty much there for the duration, if you know what I mean.

Mark Trail, 11/24/10

I worked many years as a freelancer, and I have to say that if I had been recruited by a shadowy government operative for a dangerous undercover mission, one so important that I couldn’t even fill my own wife in on the details, I wouldn’t have called up any of my clients to blab about it on an unsecured phone line. Still, it’s narratively important for Bill Ellis to hear about all this so he can blurt out everything Mark says over the phone so that in turn Kelly Welly, Mark Trail’s greatest ever recurring character, can find out about it and show up and ruin everything/make everything awesome.

You can see why Kelly might want to get out of the office, anyway, what with Bill simultaneously holding back her journalistic career and invading her personal space. Sure, the two of them might have dated a couple of times, and he taught her some techniques (so different from Mark’s!), but Kelly is obviously ready to put that chapter behind her and go screw up the Customs Department’s most ill-conceived sting operation ever.

Beetle Bailey, 11/24/10

Hey, everybody, the revolution is here, at long last! Its first target is General Halftrack. The revolution is even more misguided than I had imagined.

Archie, 11/25/10

Jughead is afraid of accidentally getting something of use out of his education; I, meanwhile, am fucking terrified of the grinning be-hatted hot dog monster that’s waving cheerily at him from the TV.

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Ziggy, 11/20/10

Congratulations, comics reader! You’ve managed to wait patiently through 40-odd years of Ziggy to arrive at this, the ultimate Ziggy panel: the title character stares dumbly at a window carved out of the blank nothingness that is his universe, from which a customer service professional cheerfully insults him, for no reason anyone can fathom. Having expressed its inner purpose in its purest form, the strip ought at any moment to simply disappear in a puff of smoke, giving us all a long-awaited chance to move on with our new, Ziggy-free lives.

Herb and Jamaal, 11/20/10

Expecting to see her husband and his friend drooling over other women — or, perhaps in her heart of hearts, to see the two of them expressing the deep affection for each other she had always suspected — she instead found them engaged in something so much more harrowing: chicken necrophilia.

Mark Trail, 11/20/10

“No, seriously, my wife is dangerous and violent! You’ve got to get help, fast, before she finds out I’ve been talking to you!”

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Spider-Man, 11/17/10

You know, I mock the Spider-Man comic strip for its determined avoidance of superheroics, but to be honest there really are few things I find duller than superheroes and supervillains battling with one other. Spider-Man is still irritating because its title character is so relentlessly unlikable, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy some of the non-Spidey-centered action. I’m really digging the Mole Man-Aunt May romance, for instance, and am particularly pleased that MJ is being put in her place for not recognizing the particular purpose each of these hideously garish gems will play in the complex and beautiful aged crone/underground monarch mating dance.

Mark Trail, 11/17/10

Oh my God: it’s Mark Trail, Undercover Fisherman! Deep in your heart, you know that everything you’ve experienced in your life so far has been leading up to this one beautiful moment.