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Momma, 7/7/09

Oh, let’s review the biography and career of Nero’s momma, shall we? Agrippina the Younger was born into Rome’s first imperial dynasty, the Julio-Claudians. She was married off to an aristocrat at the age of 13, and gave birth to her only child at 22. After her brother Caligula became emperor, rumors were that he was sleeping with all three of his sisters and offering them up to his friends at orgiastic dinner parties. Later in his reign, Agrippina and her sister Livilla conspired with their cousin Lepidus (who was sleeping with both of them) to assassinate Caligula; the plot failed, and the sisters were stripped of their fortune and exiled to a small Mediterranean island, where they had to learn to dive for sponges for a living. When Caligula was successfully assassinated, they were recalled to Rome, and Agrippina eventually seduced the new Emperor Claudius (who was also her uncle) and became empress; the emperor adopted her son Nero. Claudius eventually died — poisoned by his young wife, it was rumored — and 17-year-old Nero became emperor. Mother and son quickly became embroiled in a power struggle, as Agrippina had apparently thought she would be running the empire; she tried various tactics for keeping him under her thumb (including, it was rumored, sleeping with him), until he finally decided to kill her. He arranged for her to take a sea voyage on a booby-trapped boat, which sunk, but Agrippina’s swimming talents allowed her to swim safely to shore, so Nero just sent assassins to stab her to death. Later, he viewed her corpse and remarked on how beautiful she was.

Now, much of this — particularly her supposed intimate relations with her son, and the story that she killed Claudius — is thought by modern historians to be propaganda put out by Agrippina’s political enemies. But still, it adds an interesting bit of deep historical background to the strip’s typical Oedipal horrorshow.

Mary Worth, 7/7/09

Wow, there are exactly two instances I can remember when Mary looked this mad, and that’s when she dropped the capisce-bomb on Aldo and when drunken Rita broke her precious swans. Clearly Mr. Smith is going to end up either at the bottom of a gorge in a heap of twisted metal or exiled to the hellscape that is the Downtown Women’s Shelter. But by the way the two adversaries are sizing each other up in panel two, I’m hoping that first there’ll be a no-holds-barred martial arts battle, with lots of Hong Kong-style wire work.

Crankshaft, 7/7/09

Ha ha, Crankshaft is an angry old dick with no customer service skills! Actually, though, he’s subbing for a friend in the ice cream truck for the summer; I think he might find if he checks some of those unmarked boxes in the back, that the truck is in fact funded by pixie dust, or other two-word phrases that end with “dust.”

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Crock, 7/6/09

When you have a narrative form like a syndicated comic strip that runs on and on for decades, there are some interesting results. For instance, there may be features of your strip’s universe that made some sort of sense, or were at least explained, at the time of their introduction, but which have either slowly mutated with time or had all knowledge of their significance lost, and whose existence today is taken as a given by all concerned despite their baffling nature. Take, for instance, today’s Crock. Obviously the presence of tiny hotboxes just outside the Legion’s fort, in which prisoners condemned for some forgotten crime sit hunched over day after day for years, slowly going mad from the hot sun and the isolation, is easily parsed. But why exactly are the sides of these portable torture chambers marked with giant keyholes? Wouldn’t the key required to operate such a lock be over three feet long? Wouldn’t the mechanism for such a lock intrude onto the prisoner’s already miniscule living space? Is it perhaps not a real lock at all, but just some sort of symbol of the State’s ability to imprison on a whim, and indefinitely? Perhaps this reminds the cook of his complicity in the workings of this monstrous dictatorship, which would explain his otherwise baffling anger at having to walk approximately five feet outside to dump some greyish glop into the prisoner’s bowl.

Gil Thorp, 7/6/09

Oh, Gil, if you’re going to openly acknowledge what I asserted last week — that summertime is for wackiness in Gil Thorp — then you’d better be prepared to follow through on your promise, or you’ll just break my heart all the more. Gil having lunch with vintage clothing aficionado and former teen hobo Ted Pearse is a good start; having some kind of gangland shooting happen right outside the Thorps’ front door (involving Marty Moon? please?) is even better.

Mary Worth, 7/6/09

You know, every once in a while even Mary Worth can surprise me. For instance, yesterday I could have only thought of two possible outcomes to Mary’s weeks-long attempt to browbeat Delilah back into her loveless marriage: acquiescence or suicide. Never did I imagine that she had the strength of will to shrug off the onslaught, put on her sexiest/most insane halter top-yellow fishnets combo, and go cruising the Charterstone grounds for all her ex-boyfriends, determined to rip their stripey shirts off and have her way with them right there on the concrete (which is already cracking only a few years after it was poured, thanks to Mary’s insistence that they go with the lowest bidder). Mary looks like she’s having a stroke in the second panel, and why wouldn’t she: she’s discovered someone immune to her meddling powers! I’m surprised she isn’t just melting into a puddle.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/1/09

Ho ho, it looks like this new RMMD plot will be about the adventures of Peter the Sex Chameleon! Currently, he’s blond-headed and white-suited, the better to match the fair complexion of his wife. But when we saw him attempting to bust a move on a sexy nutritionist on Monday, he had brown hair and a blue coat! My guess is that his hair and suit were fully black as he attempted to woo his raven-haired co-worker; when Becka surprised him, he began to color-shift involuntarily, and we caught him at a transitional stage.

Mark Trail, 7/1/09

It’s a sad but all too common story: man loses money gambling, man redirects waste disposal budget to his casino account, man hires lowest bidder to dump toxic barrels in nature preserve. Of course, Mark will have no sympathy for the gentleman; not only are his environmental misdeeds unforgivable, but Mark holds deeply Manichaean view of the world, in which everyone and everything is neatly divided into good (clean-cut, clean-shaven) and evil (beard, sideburns, and/or shaggy hair), so games of chance and probability enrage him into a distinctly punchy mood.

Mary Worth, 7/1/09

As she did with Lynn the skater who didn’t want to skate anymore, Mary is teaching Delilah that the greatest pleasure comes from ignoring and suppressing one’s own desires to fulfill the needs of others. The young lady is resisting, but she’s already begun to come around; in panel two, she’s finally acceded to Mary’s request and started wearing a drool cup instead of just dribbling defiantly all over the tablecloth.

Marvin, 7/1/09

So, if the choices are Marvin peeing everywhere or dogs talking wistfully about their castration, which do you prefer? Would dogs peeing everywhere have been a more palatable middle ground? Discuss.