Archive: Marvin

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Spider-Man, 6/3/17

OH MY GOD, NEWSPAPER SPIDER-MAN, WHICH I ALREADY DECLARED MY FAVORITE SUPERHERO COMIC OF ALL TIME, HAS JUST NAME-CHECKED AN OBSCURE FIGURE FROM LATE ANTIQUITY, THE HISTORICAL PERIOD THAT I STUDIED DURING MY ABORTIVE ACADEMIC CAREER! Was today’s strip written specifically for me? Probably! Anyway, let’s go through a quick rundown of all the interesting details and historical inaccuracies they’ve managed to pack into just a few sentences:

  • The historical figure in question was actually named Romulus, which (IRONY ALERT) was also the name of the legendary founder and first ruler of Rome. The -ulus ending was a diminutive in Latin, so Romulus means “Little Rome.” Augustus was one of the Roman titles for emperor, and during his reign Romulus was known as Romulus Augustus; Augustulus, meaning “little emperor,” was a nickname given to him by later historian.

  • Romulus was, if not little, at least young: he was emperor for only a year, and he was 16 at the time. His father Orestes, who was a Roman general, was the real power behind the throne.

  • Tyrannus is the origin of our word tyrant, but in Latin in the 5th century A.D. it didn’t necessarily mean “a cruel ruler,” as it’s come to mean in English; instead, it meant someone who had usurped a throne from a legitimate ruler, without much by way of value judgement beyond that. This is actually an appropriate name for Romulus, then, because he became Emperor when his father overthrew Julius Nepos, the legitimate Romen ruler.

  • Romulus’s claim to be “the last Roman emperor” is actually pretty tenuous. In the 5th century A.D. there were usually two Roman emperors, one ruling from Italy and the other from Constantinople; over the course of the century, the western half of the empire fell apart due to external invasion and internal fragmentation, while the eastern pulled through in one piece; by the 470s, the Western Roman government only controlled Italy and the western Balkans. When Orestes put Romulus on the throne, Julius Nepos fled to Dalmatia, where he was from, and continued to rule there. Then, a year later, Odoacer, the German general who was in charge of most of the Western Roman army, killed Orestes, deposed Romulus, and placed himself under the authority of the distant Eastern Emperor, although in practice he ruled Italy as his own kingdom. Julius Nepos, the legitimate Western Emperor, ruled Dalmatia until he was killed in 480, and the emperors in Constantinople kept doing their thing (and called themselves “Roman Emperors,” although the empire was eventually almost entirely Greek) all the way until 1453.

  • Because Romulus was only a teenager, Odoacer spared his life, sent him to live with his family in southern Italy, and even gave him a pension. He pretty much vanishes from history at that point, though there’s a preserved letter from a Roman administrator that might indicate that he was still receiving his pension more than 30 years later. So is it possible that he became eternally undead due to forbidden sorcery and now seeks to claim an underground empire to compensate for the realm that was stolen from him when he was a boy? Sure, why not!

Marvin, 6/3/17

Marvin may be an awful-hell infant who’s willing to stew in his own shit-filled diapers forever just to annoy his parents, but even he understands the basic concepts of consent.

Pluggers, 6/3/17

No matter how deep pluggers get into hoarding, they can never fill the hole in their lives left by the family that abandoned them.

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Mary Worth, 5/22/17

Oh, did you think that Entertainer Esmé’s sinister plan to win Derek’s love by locking his wife Katie in a Haitian bathroom failed just because Derek quickly found and rescued her? Well, you’ve got another thing coming! Look at the sinister, knowing way she’s gazing down at the grateful but rattled Hoosiers. Obviously she never expected Katie to stay in that bathroom for long. Obviously that was just the first move in a very long game of sexual chess that ends with Derek as her lover. I remain extremely here for this storyline, is what I’m saying.

Marvin, 5/22/17

I don’t really keep up with the “game show scene” so I had to actually Google to see if Can You Top This? were a real game show. It’s not, unless you want to count an “unrehearsed” “radio panel game” from the 1940’s “in which comedians told jokes and tried to top one another”, which, around here we call that a podcast, not a game show. Anyway, it took me a minute to realize that, unlike poor Bubba Watson, Drew Carey isn’t quite being referred to by name here, which makes sense because you’d think drawing a public figure presiding over a game show where dead-eyed contestants describe getting hit in the face with streams of urine would open you up to lawsuits.

Blondie, 5/22/17

Ha ha, it’s funny because Mr. Dithers’s wife doesn’t want to spend time with him!

Pluggers, 5/22/17

Pluggers’ day-to-day lives involve coming up with coping strategies as their accumulated filth piles up around them. It’s really quite sad!

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Mary Worth, 4/22/17

I feel like I’m kind of harping on this, but this Mary Worth plot is definitely what you’d get if, in Mary Shelly’s classic novel Frankenstein, the titular scientist decided to create a ghastly simulacrum of life using not pieces of dead bodies as his raw material, but rather a bunch of brochures for cruise lines. And speaking of things stitched together from severed chunks of other things, I’m sure the Hoosiers will have a blast watching this “Broadway-quality” variety show, which will be like a Broadway show except that it’s a bunch of scenes from different plays or maybe not even a play at all, just whatever monologue the bursar or the pool cleaner or whoever used as their go-to at auditions before they gave up on showbiz and decided to commit themselves to a more steady career at sea.

Marvin, 4/22/17

Haha, remember on Tuesday when Marvin’s dad was worried about what would happen if he got caught using Marvin’s car seat to commit carpool lane fraud? Welp, he used Marvin’s car seat to commit carpool lane fraud, and now he got caught! This is definitely just part of his plan to get sent to the one place where he won’t ever have to deal with Marvin again: prison. He’ll punch that cop if that’s what it takes to make that happen.

Blondie, 4/22/17

In case you’re wondering what kind of “steward of the Earth” Dagwood Bumstead is: he dreams of the day when forbidden science creates plant-animal hybrids that will literally grow slabs of flesh on nightmarish trees, the better to feed his appetites.