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Mary Worth, 2/7/10

Uh oh — it looks like Dawn isn’t going to sit back just acquiesce to losing her father’s affections to some scam artist! It seems that she is going to try shock therapy by finding the one person who can be guaranteed to terrify Wilbur back to his senses: erstwhile romantic rival Martin Clark. Sure, he’s been dead for years, but that will make the ultimate confrontation all the more harrowing, as Dawn rigs up the rich man’s corpse to move and speak like a marionette. “Look at me, Wilbur!” Martin will say, thanks to the ventriloquist lessons Dawn’s been taking on the sly. “I’m a charred, reassembled cadaver, and yet Abby would still choose me over you!”

Blondie, 2/7/10

This right here is seven panels of Superbowl Sunday inanity punctuated by one glorious moment of complete madness. I suppose that longtime readers of Blondie are supposed to know that spinning around on one’s head is an indicator of extreme, uncontrollable emotion of some kind, but to the casual viewer, it would just appear that Dagwood, Herb, and Daisy have chosen to express their football-related outrage with a stunning display of eerily synchronized breakdancing. Which I for one am totally in favor of.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/7/10

You know who I just realized that I totally don’t get at all? Berna! She’s Rex and June’s receptionist and she runs a successful salon of some sort and she uses Yugoslav generalissimo Tito’s recipes to dominate the local restaurant scene? Why would such a power broker need a relatively menial job behind a clinic’s front desk? Perhaps she uses it to drum up business for her salon. “Honey, trust me, Western medicine can’t do a thing about those split ends. Here’s my number.”

Meanwhile, I look forward to seeing how this strip attempts to make a guy named “Toots” who has a stripey rugby shirt, a goofy little beard, and a lot of hair gel into some kind of threat against Rex and June’s carefully constructed bourgeois order.

Marvin, 2/7/10

Since we only get a single glimpse of Marvin’s dad in this strip, in which he appears to be a good 15 or 20 feet away from his terrible little son and not getting any closer, I’m guessing this is less “father/son bonding” and more “let’s bring the hateful monster outside and leave him there until he ‘accidentally’ freezes to death.”

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Mary Worth, 1/11/10

You’d think that after, what, five and a half years of analyzing this nonsense “professionally,” my capacity to be amused and delighted by the total inability of Mary Worth characters to speak the way that the humans do would have slowly been dulled. But you would be mistaken, as nothing in today’s comics got as big a laugh out of me as “I suffer from an uneasy restlessness” did. It might actually seem here that scruffy neo-hobo Kurt is going to offer a radical alternative to this strip’s suffocating bourgeois values, and will lure Wilbur away from his comfortable condo life towards a new less stable and more vital existence, traveling from town to town to see what experiences the world has in store. But Kurt came into Wilbur’s life via the Internet, and everything associated with the Internet in Mary Worth is bad, so clearly this storyline will end with that sort of disaster averted and Wilbur returned safely to his ordinary soul-numbing life.

More proof that Kurt and Wilbur may actually be related by blood: their shared impulse to wear jackets and hats of precisely the same hue.

Jumble, 1/11/10

Speaking of suffocating bourgeois values, there’s something quite poignant about today’s Jumble, in which a group of crazed shoppers respond to a half-off sale on sodium-laden processed semi-food with a level of frenzy usually reserved for the Beatles circa 1964. I’m particularly saddened by the dude in the background, who’s cheerfully running over to the freezer case to make sure that he can bring home as many trays of microwaveable goop as possible, unaware of his life’s essential emptiness.

Crock, 1/11/10

I have many gripes against the creative team behind Crock, but one particular unlikable aspect of the strip as I encounter it is beyond their control: the fact that the desert setting is routinely slathered with a neon yellow unlike any found in nature must be blamed on the post-production colorists, not the credited artists. Still, it’s distracting, as in today’s strip, where it appears that Kerwood is being worked to death in some kind of sand mine.

Marvin, 1/11/10

For decades scientists have wondered: Would it be possible to create a character less appealing than Marvin? Well, the creators of this long running crime against humanity strip have decided to take that challenge head-on, by creating a Tyler Durden-style alternate personality for the titular hell-infant that encapsulates all of his worst qualities. The horrible little pig-faced monster is wearing his hat backwards for no good reason, which I suppose is a start.

Ziggy, 1/11/10

Thanks to a challenge from Stephan Pastis, Ziggy briefly experimented late last year with putting pants on its title character. That experiment has now thankfully been abandoned, but today we can see why Ziggy usually eschews trousers, as even a few weeks of wearing them has horribly mangled his legs. Are his feet pointing backwards?

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Mary Worth, 12/20/09

Wilbur is reacting to the revelation that he may have sired a young person named “Kurt” in a way totally at variance with the way in which a normal human would respond, which I guess is another way of saying that he’s reacting exactly like a Mary Worth character would respond. He seems to be treating the possibility that he has an unknown son not as a shocking revelation or a potential scam, but rather as part of the unpleasant memories of his college years. “You know, once I graduated, I never really wanted to revisit that part of my life — the drugs, the embarrassing politics, the creation of other human beings using my naughty bits, my obsession with prog rock…”

Marvin, 12/20/09

Today’s Marvin is another strip whose entire tone is changed by the throwaway panel in the top row. Without it, we have a simple, tragic story about a young boy whose selfless gift to Santa was pillaged by a greedy dog. But with those panels in place, we know that Marvin himself stole those cookies, and thus his moral indignation at this little drama’s denouement must be seen as rather ironic.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/20/09

This is pretty much a near-perfect Rex Morgan, M.D., containing as it does June wildly oscillating between supercilious rage and mortifying self-doubt, a groggy Rex desperately trying to soothe his wife and so he can get some sleep but still expending enough energy to be kind of a dick about it, and copious amounts of skin and sex appeal all around. (I’m assuming that “mortifying self-doubt” is the emotion we’re supposed to be seeing in the second panel, as “face-melting” isn’t an emotion per se.) Panel three is a particularly delight both for June Morgan boob fans and aficionados of general ridiculousness, as June seems to have carefully positioned herself before waking up her husband. “Brook thinks you’re too cute for me … I mean, has she even seen my impossibly perfect breasts? I’m gonna cut her!”