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Mary Worth, 8/30/09

Could there be anything more delightful than the third panel of Sunday’s Mary Worth? My guess is no! Mary and Tobey are clearly bombed out of their minds after spending three hours drinking their lunch as usual; Tobey attempts a sloppy high-five in celebration of terrible couples bound more tightly together in dysfunction’s death grip, while Mary leaves her hanging and stares glassily into the middle distance. Things go downhill a bit as she ruminates on all the societal ills that her meddling has somehow failed to rectify, but I love the transition between the penultimate and final panels. Could love help overcome these important problems? As panel three demonstrates, clearly not, because if this is love, then love is repugnant beyond description.

Crock, 8/30/09

Ha ha, the heat is killing him! It’s funny because a prisoner locked in a hotbox and left out to broil in the desert sun would literally die, from the heat.

Marvin, 8/30/09

August 30, 2009, will forever be remembered as “the day Marvin showed us his ass-crack, and nobody stopped him.”

Spider-Man, 8/30/09

Now that family-friendly Disney has purchased Marvel, I’m afraid our saucy NEXT! box will have to stop hinting at hot mutant-on-cyborg-on-spider-bite-enhanced-dude action.

Slylock Fox, 8/30/09

Solution — The chain may be too strong for the saw, but Slylock’s leg isn’t. Slylock will plead for his sidekick to reconsider, but Max will just think back to years of condescension and abuse, and smile.

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Beetle Bailey, 8/23/09

While there’s a long and noble history of enlisted men holding their superior officers in scarcely disguised contempt, I’m a bit concerned about the next to last panel here, in which the men of Camp Swampy visualize the country they’ve sworn to protect as a smoldering ruin, barely held together by primitive bandages. Has the rampant incompetence so frequently on display in Beetle Bailey infected the rest of the military, leading to a successful invasion? Or do Beetle and his platoonmates simply hate America?

The ruined United States in the thought balloon is also horribly misdrawn, with northern New England lopped off, half of Mexico annexed, and the Great Lakes reduced to a greenish blob, but since Americans are notoriously ignorant of geography, this is simply par for the course.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/23/09

The content of today’s Funky Winkerbean, in which Les demands that Summer listen to a terrible joke that serves as a very thin layer over his pain over her mother’s death, still raw more than a decade later, is pretty depressing. Still, things may be looking up, as this little father-daughter moment appears to be illuminated by the bright glow of some all-consuming fire. Perhaps a nuclear attack on Westview will finally release the damned inhabitants from their misery.

Marvin, 8/23/09

Since this is Marvin we’re talking about, for “college” we should read “prison,” obviously.

Panels from Apartment 3-G, 8/23/09

HEY, EVERYONE, MARGO IS TALKING ABOUT HER LADY BITS RIGHT THERE IN THE SUNDAY PAPER OH MY GOODNESS

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Mark Trail, 8/17/09

What we’re witnessing, as this Mark Trail storyline reaches its baffling denouement, is a master class in outdoorsmanship. Who once said “The pen is mightier than the sword”? Probably some wimpy writer type who got tired of being threatened by bullies with swords and then went home and bitterly scribbled that supposedly bad-ass saying in his little journal, with a pen. But what Mark Trail is showing us is that a level head and the ability to navigate your way out of an old-growth forest is mightier than a high-powered rifle. Mark’s steely pathfinding will lull the assassin into complacency, and once they see the light of day outside these accursed woods again, he will presumably be so grateful as to meekly submit to being punched in the jaw.

Herb and Jamaal, 8/17/09

I’m as surprised as anyone to discover that I have a “favorite” kind of Herb and Jamaal strip, but this is it: the kind where one of the strip’s bland supporting characters says something incredibly depressing that forces Herb and/or Jamaal to stop living in his happy-go-lucky dreamworld of nonspecific cultural references and confront his own mortality with wide-eyed horror. I’m not sure if it’s ever actually happened before, but I’d like it to happen more often in the future.

Marvin, 8/17/09

Please let that be a clean diaper. Please let that be a clean diaper.