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Blondie, 8/2/09

Like many victims of abuse, this dedicated civil servant seems to take the horrible injuries dished out by Dagwood to be merely his lot in life. Blondie slips easily into her role as enabler, assuring poor Mr. Beasley that her monstrous husband “doesn’t mean it” and “it’s not his fault, he’s just late,” and “he won’t do it again” — platitudes that neither of them believe.

Hi and Lois, 8/2/09

Never have the Flagstons done so well at their appointed task of representing the typical middle American family: their insatiable appetite for entertainment — entertainment that can only be achieved through conspicuous consumption — leads them to go on vacations that they simply cannot afford, leading inevitably to financial ruin.

Hagar the Horrible, 8/2/09

“Oh … that Paris! My band of Viking warriors burned it to the ground, slaughtering the inhabitants who resisted us and enslaving the survivors! Why do you ask?”

Marvin, 8/2/09

Cementing his place as the most hated character on the comics page, Marvin attempts to have the municipal animal control service impound and euthanize the family pets. Fortunately, he’s only able to thought-balloon into the phone, leaving him to stew in his own impotent rage (and, since this is Marvin, presumably in his own excrement).

Mary Worth, 8/2/09

And that was the day that Charley removed the last non-porn DVD from his collection, as it apparently scares the ladies off. Delilah, meanwhile, hearing the lyrics “never let her go,” returns to her true love: Mary Worth.

The Phantom, 8/2/09

The Sunday Phantom plotline for the last God knows how long has focused on the royal love triangle summed up with admirable economy in the throwaway panels above; the “other woman” is in fact Captain Lara, Rex’s personal bodyguard, and Rex King is in fact a monarch (thus the name — get it? Is it obvious enough?). Anyway, I haven’t been covering this plot, because it’s been pretty dull, so you can imagine my surprise to see it resolved by Lara simply gunning down her rival in a lover’s rage.

Judge Parker, 8/2/09

Oh, and Judge Parker is still about horse-fucking, FYI.

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Sally Forth and Marvin, 7/26/09

Hey, guess who’s a fancy intellectual elitist book-readin’ guy in addition to the writer of a suburban middle-American comic strip? Ces Marculiano, that’s who! The opening lines of today’s Sally Forth are also the opening lines of Thomas Pynchon’s 760-page modernist classic Gravity’s Rainbow, and a tiny bit of high culture is slipped under the skin of comics readers everywhere.

But really, does Hillary’s soliloquy (good name for a band: “Hillary’s Soliloquy”) really challenge our settled, comfortable mindset the way Pynchon’s novel did? Consider this: despite the myriad kaleidescoping themes covered by the book, if you ask most people who were assigned to read it in college English what they remember about it, the first thing they’ll come up with will probably be the shit-eating. And what strip spends more time contemplating the symbolic meaning of poop than Marvin? Today’s installment is a particularly fine example, in which the title character, an absolutist on the subject of free will, insists that one can only truly demonstrate maximum personal autonomy by walking around with so much putrefying feces in one’s pants that it attracts swarms of flies. So, sorry Ces, but I think you’ll have to push the boundaries your art further if you plan to smash bourgeois sensibilities.

Mary Worth, 7/26/09

Two word-pairs you probably never anticipated seeing in juxtaposition: “Mary Worth” and “booty call.” I particularly marvel at the one-word-per-panel thought-ballooning sequence that serves as this strip’s centerpiece. Is it just an attempt to stretch limited action out over a longer Sunday strip? Does it instead represent Delilah’s grim determination to find succor in the worst way possible? Or does it simply indicate that she thinks … very … slowly?

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Spider-Man, 7/17/09

God bless the newspaper Spider-Man strip; it’s more powerful than even I could have imagined. Its ability to suck the drama and excitement out of any storyline it touches and replace it with its own imperatives — cheesy jokes, endless domestic scenes, and totally pointless, neurotic fretting about the revealing of secret identities — is truly impressive. So overwhelming is this anti-dramatic forcefield that here we have Marvel Entertainment, Inc. uber-badass Wolverine sitting with Peter and MJ at some terrible no-star restaurant and making his first-ever friends.

I seem to recall a bit in the first X-Men movie where Wolverine admitted, in an emo but manly way, that every time his claws popped out, it was painful, so naturally he’s using them here to manipulate the brown globby food slabs that he’s ordered. Look at MJ, Logan! You should cut your slabs up into blobs and eat them with a shrimp fork.

Ziggy, 7/17/09

You might think that the joke here is that a toaster is not, in fact, fun for the whole family, and thus the sign is deeply misguided. But it goes deeper: Since Ziggy has no family, and nobody loves him or ever has, he has no context for what might constitute family fun. Thus, he stares at the window display, expressionless. Is this the sort of device that families use, to enjoy themselves? He may buy it just to find out; when it fails to alleviate his soul-rending lonliness, he’ll just take it into the bathtub in an attempt to end it all that will end up failing, furthering his humiliation.

Marvin, 7/17/09

Ha ha, Marvin is going to be pecked to death, by seagulls! I take back everything bad I ever said about birds.