Post Content

Mary Worth, 11/29/11

So, whatever the Mary-gets-her-purse-stolen plot lacked in action or interest of any kind, it made up for in brevity. Mary gets her purse stolen, Mary and Toby prattle on about fraud alerts and lists of credit card numbers for a few weeks, and now we’re apparently done. The whole thing only took a month! Remember, a month in real time generally covers a period of Mary Worth story time so short that it can only be detected with extremely precise scientific instruments.

And now we’re on to a heartbreaking missing child plot, as Mary stares at poor Emily’s poster, heavy-lidded and smug (“Well, at least I didn’t have my child stolen. Really, these Smith people ought to have been more vigilant”). Personally, I’m hoping very strongly that the purse-snatching was just the set-up to the real action. What if Emily has been kidnapped by the thieves who stole Mary’s purse, because they’re assembling a Dickensian child-pickpocket ring? That sounds pretty dastardly, but you have to admit that people who dress like this are capable of anything.

Archie, 11/29/11

Oh, man, I sure hope that these ’90s Archie reruns continue to be our window into the sort of things out-of-touch adults thought kids cared about, in the ’90s! Yesterday it was teen pregnancy, and today it’s parental advisory labels on music. Just as young people say “bad” when they mean “good,” they also take warning labels as an indication that music is worth listening to! Also big with the youth in the ’90s: mullets, and t-shirts that use transitive slang verbs intransitively.

Six Chix, 11/29/11

Ha ha! It’s funny because these birds will freeze to death, because they’re poor!

Post Content

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/27/11

The throwaway panels of today’s Snuffy Smith shed light on a perennial interest of mine and nobody else’s: the economy of Hootin’ Holler. Though I’ve never spotted him as one of the strip’s cast of characters, apparently “Farmer Johnson” lives in this blighted hamlet, attempting to make a living from agriculture. Since the chickens and sausage he produces are invariably stolen by his parasitic neighbors, one wonders why he hasn’t pulled up stakes long ago, or at least given up working hard like a sucker.

If anything, the rest of the strip is even more unsettling, in that we learn that Snuffy, had not his neural circuits been overloaded by visions of chickeny pleasure, would have killed and devoured his hapless nephew. Jughaid’s pleas for mercy would have only registered in Snuffy’s mind as clucks as the thieving hillbilly lived out his great fantasy of eating an enormous angel-chicken. I assume the first throwaway panel depicts one of these divine fowl, which leads us to a sad question: Are chickens killed, dismembered, fried, and eaten, even in chicken heaven?

Crankshaft, 11/27/11

C’mon, Crankshaft, there’s plenty of room for another word-balloon lobe there, so why not end Ed’s musings with “…and, finally, your coffin?” The general vibe of the Funkyverse would seem to demand it. I mean, I’m assuming the family is intending to wall up their hated matriarch in that room Cask of Amontillado-style anyway.

Panel from Mary Worth, 11/27/11

We’ve had a few thousand years of YHWH trying to guide our morals, but we haven’t really taken the lessons to heart. A much crueler God will be handing down the commandments from now on.

Post Content

Mary Worth, 11/25/11

My God, Toby is just not going to let go of this whole Mary-Worth-getting-pickpocketed thing, presumably because it’s the first time in her entire life at Charterstone that she’s gotten to feel even vaguely superior to Mary. Mary Worth, herself no slouch when it comes to dwelling on things beyond reason, is trying to move on — “Hmm, yes, it’s hard to keep track of things when it’s noisy, live and learn, I’m just going to close my eyes and enjoy this tiny spoonful of pie now” — but Toby, desperate to keep the focus on how much better she is at being robbed, is lurching into some weird faux-Buddhist territory. “Mary, the only way to not have one’s material possessions stolen is to possess nothing. Let’s give everything we own away to the poor, or, better, just set it all on fire in the courtyard!”

Mark Trail, 11/25/11

Oh ho, Mother McQueen, you’ve just tripped yourself up! We all know that there were at least two gold bands made: the one Mark found on a goose in Lost Forest, and the one a hunter found on a goose he shot near the Canadian border years earlier. This means one of two things: either Mother McQueen is lying to her new young friends so that they don’t find her gold mine, or that nobody, including the people who publish Mark Trail, can be bothered to keep track of the details of the plots in Mark Trail.

Apartment 3-G, 11/25/11

“I can’t wait to show Lu Ann the nursery for the baby she doesn’t know she’s having yet! Then, once her mind has accepted that, I’ll take her through this door into the traditional Linski Impregnation Chamber. She is the best!”