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Mary Worth, 11/24/12

Oh my goodness, Mary. You … you really want to do this? It seems like you want to do this. Fine. Everyone, once upon a time — 2006, to be exact — there was a Mary Worth storyline that involved a man who wanted to be more than friends with Mary, and it was a very important moment in the history of this blog. Click any of the links below, for the Glory and the Majesty!

• Aldo Kelrast moved into Charterstone and immediately started saying skeevy things about Mary’s lovely hands.
• Turns out he was attracted to Mary because she looked just like his dead wife (marginally less creepy than Dawn looking like Jim’s dead sister, we guess?).
• Mary told him she wanted to be just friends with him. Actually, her exact words were that “it’s best if we don’t socialize too closely.”
• Nevertheless, he kept hanging around, so she had to be a little blunter.
• Eventually, she resorted to talking like one of those ethnic gangsters from the movies in an attempt to deter him.
• It got bad enough that Mary’s friends all staged an intervention, as if that were a way that people dealt with stalkers they barely knew in real life.
• The shame of it all drove Aldo — a recovering alcoholic who had given up the booze after his wife slipped and died in the bathtub when he was passed out drunk — directly to the liquor store.
• Getting drunk and then getting behind the wheel of a car? Amateur stuff. Aldo got behind the wheel of a car and then got drunk.
• Oops, maybe not such a good idea!
• Could he really be dead? Yep!
• Our heroes felt kind of bad about this.
• But pretty soon they were able to rationalize it.
• Then Mary went and put flowers on his grave, as a final “screw you, stalk-o.”

This — this — is the backstory to what Mary is telling Dawn. If the friendship is strong enough, your aggressive paramour will understand that no means no. And if he isn’t … well, are you ready to kill, Dawn? Kill in a way that leaves no trail back to you? Because that’s what it takes, Dawn. That’s what it takes.

Beetle Bailey, 11/24/12

I normally don’t care to know any of the backstory to the half-hearted hijinks of Beetle Bailey, but I admit this one has me curious. How long was General Halftrack followed around by an eager documentarian? Do you think he knew in his heart of hearts that it had gone badly, or had he deluded himself until this moment that he’d look like a hero to movie-going audiences everywhere? Is the titular Disaster at Camp Swampy a single, disastrous incident that was caught on film, or is it referring to the metaphorical, slow-motion disaster that’s so all-pervasive that the soldiers stationed there won’t be able to recognize it until they see it on the big screen?

Archie, 11/24/12

Ha ha, I love how angry Reggie is at the space monsters, for failing to open diplomatic relations with Earthlings. “How dare these extraterrestrial chumps refuse to speak to me! Have they even seen my amazing stripy sweater?”

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Hi and Lois, 11/22/12

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! What are you thankful for? Are you thankful that your Thanksgiving dinner isn’t some awful liberal nightmare where the lady womyn of the house forces you to sully this most American of holidays by speaking non-American languages? Such heresy! (Also, we would suggest that if we’re going down this road maybe adding Wampanoag to the list might be appropriate, but, sure, Japanese and French, whatever.)

Crankshaft, 11/22/12

Or maybe you’re thankful for the antics of your elderly relatives, who are muttering inappropriate prayers to open the holiday meal. Worried that they’re slipping into dementia? Ha ha, no, they just had to get drunk, in order to deal with all of you!

Mary Worth, 11/22/12

Personally, I’m thankful that Mary Worth hasn’t taken time off from its edge-of-your-seat plot just to bring us boring Thanksgiving messages. After all, we wouldn’t want to miss even a single day of Mary’s horribly misguided passive-aggressive meddling, would we? “Gee, Dawn, I’m sorry to hear that you don’t want to ‘help’ Jim with his sexual urges! The boy has already lost his sister and his arm, so your rejection of his advances is just one more horrible wound to his fragile psyche that he’ll just have to learn to deal with, somehow!”

Apartment 3-G, 11/22/12

While others may chose to measure Greg by the pound, Greg thinks of his own worth in terms of inches. Interpret this as you will! (I’ll be interpreting it as being about his penis.)

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Mary Worth, 11/21/12

In keeping with its overall M.O., Mary Worth is grappling with its current high drama in a weirdly blunt and concrete way that ignores underlying motivations and issues. To wit: Jim is a profoundly emotionally damaged creep who wants to be “more than friends” with Dawn because she reminds him of his dead sister (gross). He also has an irrational fear of water due to his own tragic boat-themed accident, and refuses to go to the pier because it’s “not safe” (because WHO KNOWS when some ferry is just going to stone cold slam into it, without warning?). Naturally instead of thinking, “Gosh, Jim is profoundly delusional and also creepy and controlling,” Dawn has managed to simplify this into a conflict about whether they should go down to the pier or not. If only some arbitrary compromise could be found to paper over this conflict, Dawn could live happily ever after with the guy who wants to have sex with and/or dictate every move of someone who looks just like his dead sister.

Judge Parker, 11/21/12

So it looks like this Judge Parker storyline is going to end without any chainsaw murder, but with all the newly introduced characters getting what they want — Bea a new business partner and/or boyfriend, Bubba a road out of the precarious marijuana business and into the no-risk, sure-to-succeed solar power industry, and Avery with a financial interest in both, a romantic interest in one, and a fishing hole he can go to whenever he wants to boot. But where is the lucrative financial windfall for our main characters, which is an important part of the resolution of any Judge Parker plot? At first I thought Avery’s back-cast talk was some specialized bit of movie jargon — remember, Sam and Avery’s completely conflict-free negotiations over movie rights to Judge Emeritus Parker’s book set this whole plot in motion — but no, it’s some kind of fishing thing, boring.

Shoe, 11/21/12

Longtime readers know that the patented Shoe Goggle Eyes Of Horror, in which a character reacts to a mildly corny punchline as if they’ve been told they have less than a month to live, are one of my favorite visual tropes in the strip. They’re a particularly funny overreaction when, as here, the character sporting them was the one who set up the joke in the first place. “Look, I just wanted to make a little joke about how the gender-coded cultural constructs of romance inform marketing for Mattel’s Barbie toys, and how that construct contrasts with real-world experience of monogamous, state-sanctioned relationships, but you … you took it too far!”