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Gil Thorp, 9/11/08

Thank goodness that the huge Satan-worshipping fire orgy that rings in Milford’s football season has now become an annual event. God only knows what exactly is burning in the background of panel one — probably the high school, or perhaps the entire neighborhood surrounding it — but I kind of love Gil standing on his makeshift platform exhorting his crazed minions to ever-higher levels of ecstatic bloodlust. You’ll note that at least one devotee of the flame is flashing some devil horns at the end of her jelly-braceleted arm, indicating her devotion to the archdemon Astaroth. The fact that Cully has been given temporal dominion over the football team is a sure sign of the carnage that will conclude the evening, as he fallaway slams the unwitting victims directly into the inferno, ensuring that the Dark Lord will smile on the Mudlarks this fall.

Mark Trail, 9/11/08

After much promise, the just concluded Kelly-versus-Cherry storyline rapidly declined into a total snoozefest, but I’m still holding out high hopes that we’ll get some action out of this modern day St. Francis, his adorable daughter, and their sinister raccoon familiar. So far our gentle baldy has cunningly used the passive voice to explain the plight of the thirsty, thirsty animals, noting only that the water is being “drained away.” Eventually, though, the little tyke will want to know who is doing the draining, and he’ll have to admit that it’s the humans, with their endless appetite for well-watered suburban lawns and Bed, Bath, and Beyond-bearing strip malls. Presumably the two of them will then silently watch the dehydrated beasts in panel two stumble around in the vicinity of their cabin for a bit; next, the raccoon will chitter menacingly, they’ll nod their heads in agreement, and the killing spree will begin.

Apartment 3-G, 9/11/08

Lu Ann is capable of such charming depths of self-deception that I was hoping she’d take her initial thought balloon to its logical conclusion. “Beer cans, wine bottles, and pizza boxes! It looks like a scene from a frat house movie. That’s it! Alan is allowing a major studio to use his apartment as a set for a frat house movie! It all makes sense now!” It would also explain the terrible state of the curtains; as any good set dresser knows, the stereotypical denizen of a frat house in a frat house movie is such a seething cauldron of homophobia that he would literally have a stroke if he attempted to contemplate window treatments.

Marmaduke, 9/11/08

I originally read this caption as “Why don’t you bury him in his own lawn chair?” Which you have to admit makes sense, as Marmaduke appears to be dead.

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Funky Winkerbean, 9/10/08

The most ancient of the Greek gods, considered to be primordial and the ancestors of all the others, were Ouranos (the sky) and Gaia (the earth). They were married, but they quarreled, because Ouranos forced Gaia to keep their children (the Titans) chained up inside of her body. So she secretly freed one of her sons and had him castrate her husband with a flint sickle; one of his testicles landed in the sea, which resulted in the birth of Aphrodite.

These ancient myths, while disturbing and terrible, have an undeniable power and grandeur, which is distinctly lacking in this equally horrifying scene in which Les and Crazy banter awkwardly about children and sausage slicers.

Mark Trail, 9/10/08

Sign that I am a bad person number 279: I found it kind of amusing that this kindly dad dug a grave for a wild animal. Not that we actually see the grave-digging; is it possible that he forced his daughter to do it? “What’s happening, papa?” “It’s called death, sweetie, and it’s a perfect opportunity for you to learn a valuable life skill.”

Either way, it’s a bad precedent set; the landscape is way too green for me to buy his “drought” explanation. Will he bury all of the hundreds of animal corpses left by the experimental virus that has been accidentally released from the nearby secret government bioweaponry lab?

Apartment 3-G, 9/10/08

I love that Lu Ann, who apparently has the worst self-esteem in all of recorded history, is focusing on the skimpiness of this garment. Because if Alan were cheating on her with someone who wore chaste, high-collared shirts that she stripped off during a particularly sexual-tension-filled moment during their bible study meeting, that would be totally OK!

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Mark Trail, 9/3/08

This may look like just another denouement of just another moronic Mark Trail storyline, in which Kelly Welly attempts to force herself on a wide-eyed, terrified Mark right in front of his long-suffering wife — but take a good look at said wife in the third panel. Cherry appears to be vanishing into thin air right before our eyes! If I understand the Back To The Future saga correctly, this means that Kelly will have had gone back in time and prevented Cherry’s parents from ever meeting, resulting in a Mark that was going to be single and shall earlier be open to her lascivious advances. (Sorry if that was confusing, but verb tenses get convoluted when time travel is involved.)

Apartment 3-G, 9/3/08

So it seems that the long afternoon naps were just the beginning; desperate junkies Alan and Haley also have … oh, God, I can barely say it … tattered curtains! And it looks like they haven’t done the dishes for several days! MONSTERS! THIS IS YOUR MILDLY DINGY APARTMENT ON DRUGS, KIDS!!

Seriously, why on earth would a drug habit result in tattered curtains? Did Alan hock his old curtains so he could buy drugs, but then the shred of dignity he had left caused him to root through the garbage to find some rat-eaten fabric that he could hang over the windows to prevent the folks in the building across the street from seeing him in his low state? Or, when he runs out of dope, does he just start smoking the drapery in desperation?

Crankshaft, 9/3/08

In the second panel of this strip doesn’t make you recoil in horror, you probably aren’t a terrible person like I am.

Marmaduke, 9/3/08

Having tired of devouring the common people, Marmaduke appears to have killed and eaten a comical 19th-century plutocrat.