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Mary Worth, 4/26/10

So I was talking to my mother about Mary Worth yesterday (AS IT’S TOTALLY NORMAL FOR A 35-YEAR-OLD MAN TO DO, RIGHT?) and we were discussing what the big reveal would be in this storyline. She thought it was just going to be some compulsive shopping with a little overspending thrown in for good measure; I was convinced that we were heading on to some full-on hoarding. Of course, it’s always awesome to be proven right, but I have to say I’m a little disappointed in the quality of the hoarding on display here. Yes, there are a lot of boxes and bags stacked up, but in fairly tidy piles, and even the occasional loose garment is neatly laid out on the couch or even hanging up on something conveniently off-panel. While it’s surely problematic, and in violation of Charterstone regulations (and don’t think Mary isn’t taking careful mental notes as she attempts to console Bonnie), it just doesn’t display the level of squalor that I was hoping for. Where are the six-foot-tall tangled piles of dresses, tags still on? The tunnels dug out through piles of newspaper to allow movement from room to room? The dead animals? Sorry, guys, you’re going to have get a lot more harrowing to reach “very special episode” status.

Mark Trail, 4/26/10

Actually, Mark, that’s not so much a “suggestion” as what looks to be as close as you could ever get to an erotic reverie. I dearly hope that ellipsis at the end of Mark’s word balloon in the final panel presages days or perhaps even weeks of our hero waxing rhapsodic about the awesomeness of nature in all of its quiet glory, including a graphic description of what fish guts sound like falling slimily to the bottom of a boat anchored in an otherwise silent cove, as his captive audience can only watch on in stunned silence.

Since this is Mark Trail, where your fortunes are almost entirely dependent whether Mark has taken a shine to you, I’m presuming his suggestion will be that float planes and “big motors” be banned all over the lake, except for around the camp where his friend and his sexy daughter live, since they need float planes and motorboats to keep their business alive. The Parker Brothers will of course be bankrupted as well as arrested. Another problem solved according to Arbitrary Trailian Justice, which can sting as badly as any fist!

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Funky Winkerbean, 4/21/10

Funky Winkerbean’s trip to New York featured a few moments of publishing hope for long-suffering victim Les (though surely we’ll see those dreams get squashed later), but we’ve quickly moved back to familiar territory: impotent, misplaced rage. Actually, “rage” is the wrong word: the dialogue seems rage-y enough, but the slouchy body language and numb faces denote a total absence of the passion that is rage’s necessary prerequisite. I stand by the impotence, though.

And the misplacement. There are any number of greedy, amoral morons who can be blamed for our current macroeconomic state of affairs; but, assuming that Funky is maundering about the failure of the Montoni’s franchise in New York to take off, I think it’s unlikely that, even in the best of economies, crappy midwestern pizza would have been a big hit in a city well known for its many well-established and much-loved pizza vendors. It’s not like Goldman Sachs was nefariously creating synthetic CDOs based on pizza futures and then betting against them.

Beetle Bailey, 4/21/10

Towards the end of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, God is briefly depicted as an enormous flaming aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The God of Beetle Bailey is much less impressive, consisting merely of the tiny and non-fiery Name of the strip’s creator. Today, God is attempting to make Beetle sound like someone you might actually want to go on a date with, with mixed results.

Mark Trail, 4/21/10

From my long and dedicated observation of the fauna in this strip, I’ve learned that when a senator starts emitting visible sweatballs, he is on the verge of a heart attack. This is a good illustration of the moral difference between our two rival lawmakers: Senator Good Senator only suffered a cardiac event after engaging in righteous fisticuffs with some longhair, while Senator Bad Senator’s heart is going south as soon as he realizes that arrest and/or punching might be in his future.

B.C., 4/21/10

Ha ha! The bird is afraid of being killed and eaten, but the snake thinks that the bird is afraid of being sexually assaulted!

Marmaduke, 4/21/10

Yeah, so, uh, this happened. Let’s never speak of it again, shall we?

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Mark Trail, 4/17/10

One of my favorite things about Mark Trail is that its plotting seems to demonstrate a complete lack of familiarity with how this country — or any other, for that matter — is actually in practice governed. Usually this ignorance is most obvious when it comes to law enforcement, which in this strip mostly consists of forest rangers who lead off ne’er-do-wells who Mark has punched into submission; but things tend to get extra hilarious when the plot’s focus moves to actual government bodies. Longtime readers will remember the exciting eminent domain plotline, in which a zoning hearing that would in real life have taken place in the course of some deathly dull meeting of the county legislature incomprehensibly took the form of a dramatic jury trial. And today, it looks like we’re going to see two wholly unrelated matters — a zoning proposal to restrict float planes and motorboats on a lake that may or may not be publicly owned, who knows, and a criminal complaint about a vicious gang of backwoods poachers who are holding the north end of said lake under a reign of terror — get resolved by some ill-defined gathering of white dudes in suits in some mahogany-paneled room. Who are these men? What power do they wield? Will they be putty in Mark’s hands once he shows him the shocking photos in that manila folder? One of these questions is easy to answer.

Of course, it’s wholly possible that Jack Elrod deliberately refuses to depict government realistically because he recognizes no political authority other than the NOAA as legitimate.

Archie, 4/17/10

Archie, the comics’ most notorious man-whore, is clearly trying to figure out if even he would fuck a small, disk-shaped robot.

Luann, 4/17/10

OH MY GOD TIFFANY AND GUNTHER ARE TOTALLY GOING TO LOSE THEIR VIRGINITY TO EACH OTHER EVERYBODY! I find this prospect distasteful, not least because their clashing grid-shirts will induce terrible headaches if they get any closer to each other.