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Mary Worth, 10/14/12

Jim Romenesko’s media blog has already covered the unusually flush finances of Woods and Wildlife magazine, but has been neglecting the turmoil on the feature pages of the Santa Royale Gazette-Whatever. Wilbur Weston is fully focused on his new survivors column, “I Shouldn’t Be ALive,” leaving Mary to keep noodling along with “Ask Wendy.” Absent any editorial supervision, she has quite clearly gone completely insane. Having long ago forgotten that the “Ask” in the name indicates that she’s supposed to be responding to reader letters, she now just unloads her philosophy on her readers in long, stream-of-consciousness rants. “None of us can solve the problem of evil! The ever-changing nature of the universe and the self has bedeviled humanity since the age of Heraclitus! Only through immediate action, directed by my iron will, can life have any meaning! OBEY ME, READERS! OBEY WENDY! OBEY!”

Blondie, 10/14/12

Over the course of most of this comic, I found it charming that Dagwood was imagining that he had a hooting, rowdy audience for the latest instance of his thrice-daily sandwich-building ritual. But when I realized it was actually Elmo providing the audience reactions, it suddenly got a lot more pathetic.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 10/14/12

Oh, nothing much in today’s Slylock Fox, just Reeky Rat and his punk friends sneaking a extremely filthy double entendre of a band name into comics pages across America.

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Gil Thorp, 10/2/12

If there’s one thing I genuinely love about Gil Thorp, it’s that it keeps track of a bewildering cast of characters who stick around over multiple storylines. At the end of the summer storyline, Gil offered embittered one-armed Milford alum Steve an unpaid coaching gig of the sort that he often hands out to the strip’s over-18 hangers-on. In a lesser strip, this would have been the resolution to Steve’s storyline and we would have quickly forgotten about him, but instead we see that this tiny modicum of power has transformed him into a cultish dictator. “We move together,” he shouts, waving his single fist in the air, “as one unit, one people. We hear the count in our mind before it is uttered. We present an unbroken wall of flesh to our enemies. We leave behind any family who may have once loved us, as we are all the family we need. After practice, each of you will chop off the arm of the man to your right, to make our union as real as the flesh and blood we sacrifice to the greater good.”

Mary Worth, 10/2/12

Haha, Mary Worth is really gunning hard for a spot on The Discovery Channel’s History’s Greatest Monsters this season! “Mary, my friendship with Jim is based on shared interests and experiences, not any sort of pity I have for him because of his injuries.” “That’s nice, dear, but have you considered that Jim is a charity case and that your friendship is a precious gift to him, much more valuable than his is to you? Don’t think of him as a person; think of him as an opportunity to give of yourself selflessly and condescendingly. Remember, he only has one arm!”

Apartment 3-G, 10/2/12

Not to go on too much about my “process” or anything, but when I made jokes yesterday about Evan cowering unseen in the corner while Margo and Greg bickered, it was funny because of course he wasn’t actually in the room while this was all happening! That would be super awkward! Except, um, apparently he was? Today’s first panel dialogue also nicely heads off any further jokes I might make about Margo and Evan’s twisted S&M relationship. Anyway, my point is that Apartment 3-G is getting dangerously close to producing self-aware camp and putting me out of business.

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Mary Worth, 9/27/12

Haha, Dawn isn’t even making a pretense anymore that her hospital volunteering stint is about leading a more fulfilling or spiritually rewarding life or whatever. You’d think she’d give Mary some kind of boilerplate lead-in about how “helping others is the highest reward blah blah blah” before launching into “LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT JIM THE SEXY AMPUTEE.”

Her new obsessions and her tendency to become monomaniacal about boys may explain the shocking scene here, in which Dawn is grabbing a steaming, fresh-from-the-oven pie plate with her bare hands, with a flimsy paper towel not even covering the entire hot surface. “At last,” she cries, as the odor of bubbling, searing hand-flesh fills Mary’s kitchen, “I won’t remind Jim of what he lost every time I reach to pick up a fork or salt shaker! We’ll be able to meet as equals!” (As you can see in panel two, Mary’s own hands are protected by long gloves made out of human skin.)

Archie, 9/27/12

So … the joke is that, while a teenager might accidentally use a homophone in casual writing, an adult would not? Because, as an occasionally professional editor-type person, let me assure you that there is a flaw in the assumptions here.

Ziggy, 9/27/12

Ziggy’s cat and Ziggy’s fish are sad, because they’re in love and their dreams of someday having a litter-school of cat-fish hybrid horror-children of their own has just been crushed.