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Marvin, 11/1/10

Here is today’s Marvin! It is about how the title character, who is the world’s worst baby, takes pride in the fact that he sits around in his own mess, and thinks that anyone who takes the effort to control their various lower sphincters until they can dispose of their bodily wastes in a sanitary fashion is a sucker. Marvin disgusts me, if you can’t tell!

Shoe, 11/1/10

And yet my immediate thought when reading today’s Shoe was “Ha ha, that momma bird is exhausted because she spent the night barfing whatever greasy food she eats at Roz’s diner into her baby’s mouth! Yet the strip would never dare mention such a thing, despite its ostensible bird-based premise.” These contrasting reactions prove that I am hard to please, and also gross.

Marmaduke, 11/1/10

OH GOD HE HAS THE POWER OF FLIGHT NOW NONE OF US ARE SAFE

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Panels from Mary Worth, 10/31/10

After a lunch spent mostly insulting and undermining Adrian, Jill leaves for an appointment, but the Sunday throwaway panels thoughtfully give us a glimpse of her as she walks away. Curiously, as she leaves the restaurant, her face melts from the cruel mask she’s worn throughout this episode into the dead-eyed, plump-lipped look of vagueness more typical for women in this strip. Could it be that she’s been cast into the role of emotional abuser against her will? That the masochistic Adrian pays her for the public insults and cruelty to satisfy some sick urge that her “perfect” husband-to-be Scott can’t know about? And this has been going on for months or years? No wonder she looks so exhausted in that second panel.

Panel from Marvin, 10/31/10

Just about all comic strip text is done on computers these days, so the strangely smaller font on “little candy extortionists” is probably just a lazy way for the artist to cram the words into the space available instead of rewriting or redrawing. Still, it does give the impression that something’s been changed at the last minute, and I sincerely hope that this word balloon originally ended in two or three of the foulest cuss words you can imagine.

Crankshaft, 10/31/10

The most horrifying thing any inhabitant of the Funkyverse can see is of course a member of the medical profession, since they will be spending their last agonizing months of life in a hospital, and sooner rather than later.

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Shoe, 10/28/10

No, my friend, your eyes do not fail you! That is a genuine URL medallion floating above Shoe’s head in panel two of Shoe, directing you to treetopstattler.com! One would assume that it was intended to be understood as having been affixed to the wall of the newsroom of the Treetops Tattler, the in-Shoe-universe newspaper for which most of the main characters toil, except that I think we’re also meant to understand that the Tattler newsroom is not a room as such but rather a bunch of office furniture balanced precariously on tree limbs, and thus does not actually have walls. Maybe the URL medallion is suspended from the branches that are obscured by Shoe’s word balloon? Anyway, treettopstattler.com just redirects you to the main Shoe site, which, in addition to Shoe strips, also features some fake Treetops Tattler news items that are mildly amusing. I mainly just want to praise the strip for recognizing that this “Internet” thing exists and perhaps should be taken advantage of in some way, which is an attitude largely foreign to the newspaper comics world.

In other word, the entire Tatter staff appears to have fallen asleep and, if I’m understanding the implication of Shoe’s statement, soiled themselves.

Marvin, 10/28/10

Ha ha, the erotic bond that once linked Marvin and his mother is now broken, maybe because he now recognizes how freakishly out of proportion her head is to her body, or maybe because HE IS A BABY AND SHE IS HIS MOTHER OH MY GOD THIS IS MONSTROUS.

Apartment 3-G, 10/28/10

“We both think you’re a boring lame-o!”

I find it interesting that both Tommie and Lu Ann are supposed to have distant and uninterested parents. This explains why both of them are drawn to Margo — both because she offers the combination of vague affection and soul-scraping disdain that they have come to associate with parental love, and because her own parental situation (lying, philandering dad; histrionic ethnic stereotype mom; pill-crazed, gun-toting stepmom) reminds them that, you know, you could do a lot worse than “distant and uninterested.”