Post Content

Crankshaft, 11/29/10

You know, it seems the holiday season lurches into action earlier and earlier every year. For instance, somebody’s dearest Christmas wish — to see Crankshaft in his underwear — has already arrived, and it isn’t even December yet! Merry Christmas to you, you desperate pervert!

Mary Worth, 11/29/10

Meanwhile, it seems that Adrian has already given herself a Christmas present — the massive dose of high-grade Ecstasy necessary for her to become Mrs. Scott Hewlett without first becoming catatonic with anxiety and self-loathing. She seems to have perhaps overdone it a bit, however, as in panel two she appears to actually be floating several feet off the ground.

Mary Worth plots are generally linear to a fault, so I offer kudos to the strip for jumping over the rest of the wedding preparation and getting right to the rehearsal dinner, before Mary even gets a chance to meddle Jill into submission. I am assuming that Jill is the Amazonian gal in panel one, listing wildly to her right and demanding more booze, all the better to lay the groundwork for a drunken tirade that will prevent anyone but Jill from enjoying themselves tonight. This week may be awesomer than any pool party!

Shoe, 11/29/10

“Ha ha, just kidding, you know I love a good pun! Seriously, though, we see the same prostitutes.”

Post Content

It’s Thanksgiving in the United States, everybody! What are you thankful for?

Mary Worth, 11/25/10

Are you thankful that some terrible combination of painkillers and terror hasn’t led you to make an ill-advised proposal of marriage to Mary Worth?

Dick Tracy, 11/25/10

Are you thankful that Dick Tracy is finally going to take on the killer whose name everyone knows — the police? (“My God, 911 is a joke!” Dick muses.)

Dennis the Menace, 11/25/10

Are you thankful that you’re not forced to drink glasses of gravy, like Dennis and Joey? I’m not. I’m sad that I’m not allowed to do so. Enjoy your gravy, everybody!

Post Content

Mary Worth, 11/22/10

I love the way that Jeff’s cane looms monstrously in the foreground of the second panel here. In a carefully constructed work of visual narrative, this close-up would hold symbolic meaning, perhaps representing the way Jeff has come to rely on Mary to deal with crises in his own family; or the strange emphasis might indicate foreshadowing — perhaps setting the stage for the scene where a heavily armed Jill arrives at the wedding intent on gunning down everyone wearing clothes or carrying bouquets that don’t meet her aesthetic approval, and Jeff defeats her using only his cane as a weapon. But this is Mary Worth, so it’s probably there just because the artist likes drawing canes. And hey, let’s draw it leaning up against the wall at an impossible angle! Sure, why not?

I knew that the wonderful/horrible “Citizen Cane” gag had appeared in Mary Worth before, but I assumed that it had been Dr. Jeff’s joke all along, and that now it was a conversational crutch (ha!) that he used whenever it came up in conversation. “See, I’m not a decrepit, enfeebled old man! I’m wittily commenting on my own need for physical support when I walk! You kids today think you invented ironic distance, don’t you? Well, someday your knees will be in constant pain, and you won’t even be able to put your skinny jeans or your vintage-store corduroys on without popping a fistful of Advil first, and you’ll be proud if you come up with something as funny as ‘Citizen Cane.’ Hey! Get back here! I’m talking to you!”

But a little search through the archives shows me that the joke was actually used by Ella, who was briefly Mary’s rival for Charterstone meddling supremacy before she left for parts unknown. Which raises a host of worrying questions. Did Jeff kill Ella and steal her cane, believing it to be the source of her supernatural powers? Is “Jeff” secretly Ella, wearing a very clever disguise for terrifying and inscrutable reasons? Or is the cane itself the motive force here, possessing first Ella and then Jeff, forcing them to engage in unspeakably evil acts?

The Jumble, 11/22/10

I don’t know why, but I’m kind of impressed that this Jumble office scene includes one of those weird tripodal speakerphone things that are often used to set up phone conferences, or at least were often used 10 years ago, when I last regularly participated in group calls in office conference rooms. I guess I just expect any white-collar workplace scene in the comics to be 30 years out of date at the minimum. I’m so satisfied by it that I’m not even going to pursue the whole story of how to protagonist managed to horribly injure himself getting donuts.