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Mary Worth, 8/21/15

One of the complaints about the modern-day movie industry is that studios don’t seem to produce midrange movies anymore; everything is either a tiny indie film made on a shoestring or a huge blockbuster action movie or broad comedy. Mary Worth, as usual, steps up to fill the market that Hollywood is ignoring. Sure, the strip provides big hits like Aldomania or Wilbur’s Illegitimate Not-Son; but it also provides smaller, quieter, but still utterly engrossing plots like Ian Kisses Up To His Boss And Toby Remembers She’s An Artist And They Seethe At Each Other About It. I am hooked and I am not ashamed to admit it!

Anyway, today we learn that Toby’s art show, which features a range of greyscale blobs and quadragons, is downtown, and I’m really glad to see the local artist community is helping gentrify a neighborhood that used to be a dangerous hellhole. Maybe it’ll soon be safe enough for even Mary to go there! Meanwhile, Ian realizes that he’ll have to choose between sitting through a boring and presumably outdated lecture from Hilton Berkes about whatever subject he used to specialize in before he took a cushy administrative job and going to Toby’s show and hopefully seeing that warrior in the background of panel once coming to life and murdering everybody.

Heathcliff, 8/21/15

Heathcliff sure had been into surfing jokes lately, huh? Yes, what if a cat were a surfer. And some aliens saw him. And the aliens were also surfers. That would be truly radical, and also whimsical, would it not? God, this makes me exhausted just looking at it.

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Apartment 3-G, 8/20/15

Welp, looks like I was right! Eric is indeed Margo’s long-thought-dead almost fiance. This is a potentially fascinating plot point from 2009-era Apartment 3-G, which is too bad because this is 2015-era Apartment 3-G so it’ll just lie there like a dead fish and go nowhere. Probably there won’t be any details revealed! Why did Tim grieve for Margo? Did he live in the avalanche but everyone else in the world died? It would explain a lot about the ghostly, dream-like quality of life in this strip.

Mary Worth, 8/20/15

Mary Worth, though! Mary Worth is a strip that continues to fire on all cylinders, awesome as ever. Behold, Toby sullenly dumping milk onto a plate full of Splak® brand breakfast slurry! Gasp as Ian appears to absent-mindedly wrench the refrigerator door from its hinges with the strength of his lowland gorilla kin! Ahhhhh yeah, that’s the stuff.

Spider-Man, 8/20/15

This dialogue could be construed as light-hearted teasing but, the facial expressions make it clear that this is some high-level spider-dickery going on right now. “I’m disappointed about how foolish you were to be jealous of the Black Widow. Your failure to trust me totally absolves me retroactively of any guilt I should feel over all the times I had sex with her!”

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/18/15

Back a couple of months ago, when Darrin suggested to Les that he should “write about how you met my mom … how you met Lisa,” this is what I had to say on the subject:

What you should do with your next book is write about how you met and fell in love with Cayla, your current wife, and how that new relationship helped you move forhahahahaha obviously I’m kidding, write about Lisa, always Lisa, write about meeting Lisa and it will seem exciting and romantic at first but a miasma of despair will always be floating over it, always, because Lisa is dead and Lisa is always dead and you’re going to write about Lisa’s death forever and ever.

I’m ashamed to admit that at the time I had forgotten that Les had already written that book about Cayla, two years ago, and had promised to turn the trip to micromanage the vanity press that he would pay to publish it into a fully tax-deductible Hong Kong vacation. Except … that never happened? And now Les’s “publisher” has decided to not publish that book, which I’m sure Cayla enjoys thinking of as a “sequel,” until it can be integrated into the Lisa Trilogy of which it is obviously an integral part.

Anyway, Cayla’s been spending a lot of the strip lately staring dead-eyed and silent at Les as he douches it up, and I’ve been wondering: what if she decides to divorce him? At first, this seems extremely likely, as it would no doubt up the misery quotient for the strip. But I don’t think any character has actually received a deserved comeuppance for their terribleness in this strip since Cindy left Funky when his drinking got completely out of control. The pain people in the Funkyverse suffer is capricious and arbitrary. An arc where they experience negative repercussions as a result of their conduct would require someone to acknowledge that there was something wrong with their conduct in the first place.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/18/15

Meanwhile, in Rex Morgan, gold-digging former nanny Heather Avery is still young and vital, making it all the more tragic that her older, wealthy husband is sliding into dementia. I’m not sure if she’s coming on to the hired help here or just engaging in her right as an aristocrat to imperiously dissect her servant’s personal life in front him.

Mary Worth, 8/18/15

My questions as to whether the participants in the latest Mary Worth dinner from hell recognize it as a dinner from hell have now been answered. Look at Ian’s expression in panel two. That’s the face of a man who’s seen some shit, by God.