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Mary Worth, 8/4/11

As you’d probably guessed by her stunningly attractive face and ponytail, Mary’s new best friend Gina the waitress is irresistible sexual catnip to all the gross old dudes who come in to eat at her crappy diner. Seriously, look at this creepy fellow, who’s slathered on the hair dye so indiscriminately that he’s managed to get a bunch of it in his ear. He’s also given Gina what appears to be a five-digit phone number, so maybe he’s just really nervous, or playing some larger head game with her, imagining her dialing 7-3-5-6-4 and standing at the phone dumbfounded, not understanding why she hasn’t yet reached the stud she desires. But little does he know that Gina has long ago given up any hope for love … ever again. Give her all phone numbers you want, it’ll do no good!

Anyway, obviously this guy is bad because he thinks his big tip will get Gina to have sex with him. Mary, on the other hand, thinks her big tip will get her unrestricted access to Gina’s life decisions, and she’s the hero of this comic. Mary can smell a mopey word balloon a mile away, so now we know that her meddling will be of the matchmaking variety. Probably she’ll try to hook her up with Dr. Drew, because Gina’s drippy passiveness is such a pleasant change from his last girlfriend.

Apartment 3-G, 8/4/11

Tommie’s eyes are crossing as she allows herself to dwell on her favorite fantasy: having kids with Margo. Margo will be the breadwinner, and Tommie will stay at home and teach the kids that they mustn’t ever bother Margo, especially when she’s been drinking or scheming.

Garfield, 8/4/11

So, Garfield is one of those strips where all the animals are sentient and have thought balloons, right? Like probably this fish had thought balloons that we could have seen, before Garfield killed it and savagely tore its skin and flesh away from its bones? Now he Jon are looking at its corpse!

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/31/11

Today’s Snuffy Smith demonstrates how complicated it can be using visual signifiers in a strip that’s nearly a century old and that takes place in some difficult-to-pin-down time and place. Obviously the joke here is that our rustic hillbillies are living a lifestyle that very modern environmental and local-food advocates would endorse. And yet the only way the strip can depict someone as a fancy city-dwelling type is to dress them up in clothes that seem to date from roughly the Coolidge Administration, a time during which a flatlander would be much more likely to head up into the hills looking for precious coal to strip mine, not researching sustainable agriculture. Of course, it’s wholly possible that there’s a Brooklyn subculture of young lefty hipsters for whom bow ties, suspenders, and straw hats are the height of fashion, so maybe I’m just not with it enough to get what’s happening here.

As a side note, I’m pretty impressed that the strip managed to sneak in a joke about mule farts in the middle there.

Mary Worth, 7/31/11

I love that Mary has to consciously remind herself not to stiff the waitress on the tip. “Normally I assume that the trampy young women the waitressing lifestyle attracts just spend all their free cash on prophylactics and reefer, so I leave them nothing. But this one gets the full 10 percent!”

Phantom, 7/31/11

High-tech superhero lairs sure seemed a lot cooler before the Internet, didn’t they? It’s not as exciting to see the Phantom get a crucial piece of information from a Google News alert.

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Marvin, 7/28/11

Every once in a while, I question some of my comics obsessions and bêtes noires. Do the newspaper comics really have the horrible tendencies that I attribute to them, or am I just being uncharitable because of my own particular mission as a curmudgeonly comics commentator? Take Marvin; is this strip really the shit-stained horror that I make it out to be, or is it merely a whimsical take on infancy that happens to include the occasional joke about diaper-changing? When I’m wracked with self-doubt of this kind, it’s almost a relief to see strips like today’s, in which Marvin spasms uncontrollably while taking a huge dump in his pants, and then cracks wise about how gross it is, inside his pants. Thanks, Marvin, for reinforcing all my worst opinions about you!

Mark Trail, 7/28/11

Because Mark was able to convince mountain man John Thrasher to come down from the mountains and also no longer have PTSD, he’s now gotten cocky and believes that he can convince anyone or anything to do whatever he asks. If there’s a something more hilarious than Mark Trail wading towards a goose and bellowing “WAIT! RELAX!” at it, I’m not sure what it could possibly be.

Mary Worth, 7/28/11

Oh, wait, never mind, some poor waitress running away from Mary Worth and vomiting in terror and disgust is definitely funnier.