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Mary Worth, 6/29/11

So, this might not be the most outrageous moment in Mary Worth history — nobody died in a fiery car crash, or was lured into a sex den or thrown bodily out of a rehearsal dinner — but it’s delightfully shocking all the same. Mary has decided to help Liza by finding an outlet for her persistent nature! And by “persistent” we means “psychotic.” Liza will be the kind of salesperson who repeatedly calls you to urge you to buy whatever it is she’s peddling, shows up at your work and home unannounced with already filled out paperwork so you can “just finalize that deal we worked out,” and eventually rifle through your trash to find your signature, the better to forge it and close the sale with your consent. She’ll be a millionaire within a year!

Marmaduke, 6/29/11

Speaking of aggressive salespeople, Marmaduke has done pretty well in establishing this magazine shill as threatening with only some sunglasses and a leer. Not that he’ll be trouble for long, as Marmaduke is going to eat him in a minute.

Marvin, 6/29/11

“Oh, and in unrelated news, we dogs have managed to develop bipedalism and opposable digits. Combine that with our powers of telepathic communication and you humans are totally screwed!”

Spider-Man, 6/29/11

“Oh, that’s right, I had to fire everyone at the paper, because of the Internet. Welp, guess I’ll update the blog and call it a night!”

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B.C., 6/13/11

You know, as much as I rail against the practice of keeping the same 30 or so comic strips in every newspaper in America, despite the deaths of their creators, I do understand why people like having them around. There’s something tremendously comforting in seeing the same characters, day after day, year after year, doing the same things. You get so accustomed to their rhythms that you pretty much stop questioning the strip’s visual conventions, even those conventions were laid down years before you started reading and you’re never quite sure where they came from in the first place.

Take the clothes that the cavemen of B.C. wear, for instance. I guess they’re supposed to be kind of a loincloth thing? At one point they involved a shoulder strap of some sort, but now they’re just a black strip around the waist area. Johnny Hart no doubt came up with the character design fairly early in the strip run and then promptly stopped thinking about it. However, now his grandson is in charge and is playing around with things, which involves forcing us to contemplate the fact that the cavemen’s dangly bit are on full display under these “suits,” which, thanks a lot, I think I’d like to go back to the unchanging nostalgia now.

Gil Thorp, 6/13/11

Ha ha, look at how angry Gil is in panel two! He may not have given a crap when sinister Hobart threatened to slash school budgets and lay off most of his co-workers, but when people start talking about his drinking problem and his inappropriate fraternization with students, well, that’s when things get ugly.

Slylock Fox, 6/13/11

This is pretty much one of the most hilariously depressing Slylock Foxes ever. “Sorry Max, your idea is flawed due to your fundamental inability to grasp basic thermodynamics. What? No, I don’t have a better idea. All these candles are going to melt and and this poor lady is going to go bankrupt! Well, we really should be going.”

Marvin, 6/13/11

While I can’t blame Marvin’s family for turning to illegal drugs to deal with the fact that they’re related to Marvin, I’d have guessed that they’d go for alcohol or other depressants, which would dull the pain if only temporarily. But Jeff clearly finds that coke or speed or something along those lines helps him cope, and who am I to judge?

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Marvin, 6/3/11

With this, I dearly hope that Marvin has reached the lowest point it can with the bathroom humor. In fact, I’m not sure this can be defined as “humor” at all. It’s just all “That dog has a name that sounds like ‘pee,’ because he urinates everywhere.” I guess if this were a spoken conversation (or, as is the case here, a telepathic conversation between a baby and a dog) there’d be a vague pun in that you’d think the name is spelled “Peabody” but really it’s “Peebody” because he likes to “pee” on things. But seeing it written out means that you know there’s nothing but piss jokes coming in panel two, so hang onto your hat (because otherwise Peebody the dog will urinate on it).

I suppose “bladder control issues” was some kind of syndicate-imposed euphemism, but it does add an extra bit of awfulness because it implies that Peebody’s peeing is involuntary, and probably causes him great shame.

Apartment 3-G, 6/3/11

Oh, hey, Aunt Iris has departed abruptly and now Mrs. Bloom is back from Florida, whither she decamped a few months ago, apparently for extensive cosmetic surgery. Don’t anger her any further, Tommie, she’ll taser the crap out of you.

You know, Iris has vaguely intimated that her friends and family don’t approve of her “gypsy lifestyle.” Naturally I’ve always assumed that this was because the squares in the A3Giverse are easily shocked by any even vaguely out-of-the-ordinary behavior, but maybe it’s because she always just picks up and leaves town without saying goodbye to anyone, like a jerk.