Post Content

Mary Worth, 8/18/09

See, this is what keeps drawing me back to Mary Worth year after year — the brief moments of terror amid the long stretches of boredom. Panel two seems to lurch at us directly out of some Escherian nightmare, with Delilah’s head and Lawrence’s hand looming impossibly large for the relative distances established in the first panel. And artistic trauma aside, I’m unsettled by Lawrence’s instinct to muffle whatever mildly simpering response Delilah’s about to come up with. “When we have kids, I’ll want to spend time raising them. It’s a more important job.” “I feel the same! But what about the loss of incMMMMFFFF!” “Hush, my beauty. I SAID I’LL BE SPENDING MY TIME RAISING THEM WHILE YOU LOOK ON IN ADORING SILENCE!”

Mark Trail, 8/18/09

Oh, bitter irony! Having trained for so long to merely wound and scare with his gun, our rifleman finds himself unable to finish off Mark, and instead sets loose an avalanche of toxic waster barrels that will crush him to pulp. Of course, if my many years of reading comics have taught me anything, it’s that the noxious chemicals will preserve his mangled body and grant him terrifying superpowers. Mark will return to his cabin with his usual smug grin, unaware that Lost Forest is being stalked by a monstrous orange supervillain: The Near Misser!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/18/09

If Becka’s look of mounting anxiety in the third panel is any indication, this half-assed flirting is going even worse than I had feared. “Oh, God, fly fishing? Really? This is awful. I gotta find one of those depressing demented people to chat with.”

Apartment 3-G, 8/18/09

Actually, Lu Ann, I think it’s more accurate to say that Tommie is socially awkward.

Post Content

Mary Worth, 8/14/09

OK, folks, as much as we keep making jokes about Lawrence’s extracurricular sex activities, I think we’re just sort of whistling in the dark to stave off our acknowledgement of the inevitable denouement of this tale: namely, that Delilah is going to drag Lawrence bodily into his hotel room, throw him down onto the overstarched sheets, and perpetrate scandalous acts of marital intimacy that she learned about from the backs of the DVD cases on Charley’s porn shelf, singing Rogers and Hammerstein all the while. “But Josh!” you’re probably saying, “this is the comics page, and Mary Worth to boot! Can they imply that a sex act might happen, even off-stage?” Well, if said characters are joined in holy and legal matrimony, I’m afraid so, if this steamy honeymoon scene from a few years ago is any indication, so we’re just going to have to brace ourselves for the red hot Lawrence-on-Delilah action. It’s fitting that Lawrence is checked into room 2012, the year of the Mayan apocalypse, as these unlikeable characters’ coupling will make us all long for the end times.

Gil Thorp, 8/14/09

As an already angry and hate-filled Marty DeJong peppers Ted Pearse’s team of hobo children with baseballs, the Scott McCloud lookalike urges him to “ease up.” Longtime Gil Thorp readers know that this seemingly innocent two-word combination is actually a trigger phrase, which will inevitably lead to someone getting punched in the tonsils. All I can say is that it’s about time.

Archie, 8/14/09

You know, Archie, maybe you ought to worry less about Dilton’s whimsical sports mix-ups and more about the fact that time and space are bending improbably all around you. Note that Moose’s torso is in front of the volleyball net, but his feet are behind the sand dune’s rise, and the net’s pole is well in front of it. This dimensional anomaly can’t be good for your health, and Archie is right in its path.

Post Content

Curtis, 8/11/09

Today’s Curtis is a truly epochal event! It’s not because Barry casually implies that Michelle is some kind of sinister pagan priestess, performing voodoo rituals in her lavishly appointed apartment. Ha ha, no, that’s just standard-issue Curtis madness. And it isn’t because we catch a rare glimpse of Curtis’s head without his hat perched upon it, though that’s always intriguing. (It is kind of amusing that he’s carefully combing it into place only to cover it up with his trademark chapeau for the next 23 hours.) No, what’s really important is that this is the probably the first newspaper comic in living memory in which the punchline (or, at least, the unsettling sentence occupying the space where the punchline would normally be) is being delivered by someone who’s urinating. Since I blessedly grew up an only child, I have to ask: did any of you ever wander into the bathroom and engage in banter with your sibling, and then one of you just stone cold started peeing? Because that’s … that’s gross. It’s gross if you did that.

Mary Worth, 8/11/09

“Yes, it’s true; my lectures, while inspiring and life-affirming, tend to attract the worst kind of perverts: relationship voyeurs. Always trying to overhear sincere conversations between two beloveds, getting their rocks off on emotional intimacy … YEAH, YOU IN THE GLASSES! YEAH, I SEE YOU! SICKO! I’M NOT SIGNING YOUR BOOK NOW!”

No, but seriously, I certainly hope that this blonde lady is either a snoopy reporter about to question Lawrence about his many monstrous crimes or carrying Lawrence’s love child. Because if we’ve got four days ahead of us of Lawrence and Delilah emoting weepily in Lawrence’s hotel room about the depth and majesty of their love, after all the promise this storyline had, I will be … not so much angry as just disappointed.