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Mary Worth, 1/11/10

You’d think that after, what, five and a half years of analyzing this nonsense “professionally,” my capacity to be amused and delighted by the total inability of Mary Worth characters to speak the way that the humans do would have slowly been dulled. But you would be mistaken, as nothing in today’s comics got as big a laugh out of me as “I suffer from an uneasy restlessness” did. It might actually seem here that scruffy neo-hobo Kurt is going to offer a radical alternative to this strip’s suffocating bourgeois values, and will lure Wilbur away from his comfortable condo life towards a new less stable and more vital existence, traveling from town to town to see what experiences the world has in store. But Kurt came into Wilbur’s life via the Internet, and everything associated with the Internet in Mary Worth is bad, so clearly this storyline will end with that sort of disaster averted and Wilbur returned safely to his ordinary soul-numbing life.

More proof that Kurt and Wilbur may actually be related by blood: their shared impulse to wear jackets and hats of precisely the same hue.

Jumble, 1/11/10

Speaking of suffocating bourgeois values, there’s something quite poignant about today’s Jumble, in which a group of crazed shoppers respond to a half-off sale on sodium-laden processed semi-food with a level of frenzy usually reserved for the Beatles circa 1964. I’m particularly saddened by the dude in the background, who’s cheerfully running over to the freezer case to make sure that he can bring home as many trays of microwaveable goop as possible, unaware of his life’s essential emptiness.

Crock, 1/11/10

I have many gripes against the creative team behind Crock, but one particular unlikable aspect of the strip as I encounter it is beyond their control: the fact that the desert setting is routinely slathered with a neon yellow unlike any found in nature must be blamed on the post-production colorists, not the credited artists. Still, it’s distracting, as in today’s strip, where it appears that Kerwood is being worked to death in some kind of sand mine.

Marvin, 1/11/10

For decades scientists have wondered: Would it be possible to create a character less appealing than Marvin? Well, the creators of this long running crime against humanity strip have decided to take that challenge head-on, by creating a Tyler Durden-style alternate personality for the titular hell-infant that encapsulates all of his worst qualities. The horrible little pig-faced monster is wearing his hat backwards for no good reason, which I suppose is a start.

Ziggy, 1/11/10

Thanks to a challenge from Stephan Pastis, Ziggy briefly experimented late last year with putting pants on its title character. That experiment has now thankfully been abandoned, but today we can see why Ziggy usually eschews trousers, as even a few weeks of wearing them has horribly mangled his legs. Are his feet pointing backwards?

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Mary Worth, 1/8/10

I’m pretty sure that panel two of today’s Mary Worth is what happens when you have MC Escher draw your family reunion. Note that Kurt and Wilbur are ostensibly sitting on the same piece of furniture, but Kurt’s waist is somehow level with Wilbur’s knees. That may have something do with the fact that Kurt is turned 90 degrees towards Wilbur, but his legs are still magically able to bend! Meanwhile, Dawn appears to be drawing away from Wilbur and her probably-not-actually-half-brother in disgust, tucking her right arm awkwardly behind her back so that Wilbur can’t touch it, and somehow moving closer to the viewer than the actual length of the couch would seem to allow. Just as Kurt has disrupted the Westons’ lives with his story about his illicit parentage, so too has his presence disrupted the actual fabric of time and space in their condo unit.

Also, I like their plan of finally setting some time aside to get to know each other better next week! It should make the next few days of sitting around the house awkwardly super-fun.

Apartment 3-G, 1/8/10

Wow, it looks like dating a foul-mouthed married pill addict isn’t a bed of roses — who could have guessed? I’d have more sympathy for the outrage being perpetrated against Ari’s professionalism if not for the fact that he actually appears to be not so much “with a client” as “wandering around the foyer of his office while his client presumably drones on and on about his emotional problems in the next room, seriously, that guy never shuts up, he probably won’t notice if I take a break for a few minutes.” Also weighing against Ari’s right to be self-righteous: the fact that he prescribed sleeping pills to one of his clients almost immediately upon meeting her, then started sleeping with her. What I’m trying to say is that Ari can, in fact, go to @#*%!!

Family Circus, 1/8/10

My favorite thing about today’s Family Circus is the look of disappointment on Big Daddy Keane’s face. It’s like he always had dreams of having kids so he could read stories to them, only discover that actual children ruin everything by thinking for themselves and being bored and irritated by the things you like. At least Dolly is staying engaged enough to know what’s happening in the story, even if she’s going to pick it to bits with her dumb questions; PJ looks as if he’s fantasizing that something more interesting is happening — that’s he watching television, or instance, or staring at the wall.

Garfield, 1/8/10

Ha ha! Garfield and Odie are voyeuristic perverts!

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Funky Winkerbean, 1/5/10

So I’ve been reading the new, retooled Funky Winkerbean long enough to distinguish amongst the various forms of creeping dread found therein, and to have preferences among them, and this here is pretty much my least favorite flavor of creeping Funky Winkerbean dread: Les’s creeping dread about his daughter’s burgeoning sexuality. Summer actually seems against all odds to be a pretty well-adjusted person, but that won’t stop Les from mapping his own awkward, fumbling adolescence onto her. (The rear-view mirror knocked askew by his helmet of hair in the flashback is a nice touch.) While Les should probably be more worried about the terrible, life-ruining car accidents the kids are prone to — just ask Becky the one-armed band leader! — the automobile instead represents to him an avenue Summer can use to escape his suffocating control, and his thoughts drift unbidden to his daughter and some faceless dude in the back seat, hands drifting south, clothes slipping off of young, athletic bodies … and … so forth.

Luann, 1/5/10

Of course, if you really want unsettling car-based sexuality in the comics, you’ve got to turn to the Brad and Toni show in Luann. It’s Toni’s hand gesture in the third panel that really puts this strip beyond the feature’s usual ribaldry, as she seems to be promising to “go under the hood” and manually pleasure Brad’s car in unspeakable ways.

Mary Worth, 1/5/10

One person whose awkward sexuality I personally can’t get enough of is Wilbur, obviously. Most of us would have a lot of conflicted emotions if we discovered that we had an adult son we had never met, of course, but Wilbur mainly seems to be having sexy intrusive thoughts about the boy’s sexy dead mother. Those huge blue eyes … that unnaturally long neck … that weird bunchy collar … who could ever forget a face like that? Well, Wilbur could, as you can see when all of his reveries about his lost love are compared:

With the different facial features and neck lengths on display here, I think you’d be hard pressed to recognize these as the same woman. The only thing they seem to have in common is a tendency to list to the right, perhaps as a result of some kind of inner ear disorder. I’m now guessing that Wilbur was such a prolific seducer in his youth that he honestly doesn’t remember who this “Abby” character was, and the “demon” he needs put to rest is his uncertainty over which of his many lovers bore the man who showed up on his doorstep.

Mark Trail, 1/5/10

Of course, Mark Trail is where we should go to escape from human sexuality of any sort. I particularly love today’s new-adventure-launching installment, as it nicely encapsulates the sort of dream state that defines most Trailian narrative. “Oh, my old friend called me earlier? I’ll just pick up this phone right here at the table and talk to him. Hello, Leonard Nimoy!” “Hi Mark! Did you know that you have an ‘outdoor reputation’? You do, and it can solve problems! Why don’t you bring you and your reputation over to out here, which is far, far away from your wife?”