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Mary Worth, 11/23/08

When I was a kid, my dad told me stories about his high school health teacher, who in turn told my dad a set of entirely fanciful “facts” in the course of his education, the most prominent and horrifying of which was that a gila monster could bite on to your hand and become attached so firmly that the only way to get it off would be through surgery. Though this was explicitly presented to me as not reflecting the true nature of that gentle if venomous desert lizard, it was nevertheless an extremely vivid image that my younger self spent far too much time dwelling upon.

I bring this up now because the usual metaphors used to illustrate a tenacious, unyielding grip — a vise, say, or a bear trap, or a pit bull — are wholly inadequate to describe just how tightly Mary is clinging to the dark secret Lynn hinted at earlier this week. There’s only one way to put this: Mary has locked her jaw around the thin limb of Lynn’s hidden scandal like the nonexistent gila monster of my father’s health teacher’s fevered imagination. She will remain just within Lynn’s earshot indefinitely, hissing orders that she give up the goods, until we finally learn just what dark stain on the poor young woman’s soul is making her so very unhappy. PREDICTION: It will turn out to not be particularly interesting.

Judge Parker, 11/23/08

Judge Parker has played the sexy lady card in this storyline particularly hard, in that the main guest stars are a sexy lady detective wearing leather pants and a sexy lady stripper wearing very little. But as we see illustrated today, the only thing more exciting than a sexy lady is a deadly, stab-happy sexy lady (though perhaps that’s a shade less exciting than a sexy lady wired with explosives.) Anyway, this will no doubt very quickly devolve into some sort of terrible pit of Mike Hammer-style faux-noir misogyny, with the only question being whether Sam trots out his detached monologue about dames gone wrong and the men they drag down with them at central booking or the morgue.

Slylock Fox, 8/23/08

There is no doubt that comics reflect the essential zeitgeist of their age. For instance, when Slylock Fox was launched in 1987, I’m sure most of the crimes Sly was called on to solve involved muggings, petty thefts, break-ins — the sort of threats that obsess the middle classes when they fear that the violence of the proletariat is on the verge of boiling over. Today, though, as our economy begins to unravel and we are told that the culprits are the captains of industry and financial instruments that we can’t begin to understand, our fox detective is more and more frequently being called on to prevent corporate flim-flam jobs and, as we can see here, shady real estate deals. If only Slylock were appointed to head the SEC, maybe we’d be able to get to the bottom of our financial woes, through careful and deliberate ratiocination and/or information that we aren’t actually privy to.

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Apartment 3-G, 11/19/08

So, that killjoy Lu Ann has finally left town, and we all know what that means — BOOZE PARTY IN APARTMENT 3-G, WOO-HOO! Even though it probably won’t end with drunken makeouts, it will still be the greatest: Margo will go on at length about all the men she’s ever slept with and all the men she’s ever killed (the two lists have significant overlap), Ruby will giggle girlishly and tell increasingly humiliating stories about how stupid Lu Ann was as a little girl, and Tommie will sit on the couch staring blankly ahead with her collar buttoned up to the very top button.

Mary Worth, 11/19/08

Oh my God, Mary and Lynn’s hands are about to touch in panel one. Hot … HOTT. Unfortunately, something happened in panel two that worried Mary. We know it must be something serious, because Mary’s far too unflappable to be startled by a little bold font, but I’m at a loss to say what it might be. Is Lynn spontaneously urinating with grief all over the bed? I guess I’ll be forced to tune in tomorrow to find out! And then back to the hand touching.

Mark Trail, 11/19/08

Oh, Rabbit! With each panel in today’s strip, your sneer gets more twisted with hate for everyone — hate for Mark Trail and his lucky punches, hate for your long-suffering wife who always complains about you spending all your time chaining raccoons to logs, hate for this fancy businessman who just thinks he can buy and sell you, which is all the more galling because he can — and yet you work your way further into my heart. I won’t be sorry when your blue baseball cap goes flying through the air again, three to six weeks from now, but I’ll still feel a little bad about your failed search for a place in a world you never made.

By the way, if Charlie gave me an offer like the one he’s giving Rabbit here, this is how I’d go about things:

1. Take the $2,500.
2. Give Mark $2,000 to leave town.
3. Get the other $2,500.
4. Use $3,000 to hire a production company to pitch “Dog vs. Raccoon” to the Discovery Channel, Versus, or ESPN 3.

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Herb and Jamaal, 11/17/08

Far be it for me to tell hard-working cartoonists how to do their jobs … oh, wait, actually, it turns out that that’s exactly what my schtick is. Anyway, clearly ketchup is the wrong vaguely edible item to be used as the lynchpin of this joke. I think virtually all American bachelors have ketchup in their refrigerators. Quite a few probably have only ketchup in their refrigerators. Back when I was a bachelor, I had generally had in my refrigerator mayonnaise, milk, butter, barbecue sauce, leftover Chinese food, and a bottle of ketchup — even though I never really put ketchup on anything, I just sort of felt like it was something I had to have. It’s the Default American Condiment.

Anyway, this comic would have worked better if Herb had asked for, say, that mysterious gooey pink sauce you get in packets with Chinese take-out. I was going to try to figure out the name for that substance, but then I realized that “that mysterious gooey pink sauce you get in packets with Chinese take-out” also worked better in the Herb and Jamaal oeuvre. Of course, it would be kind of weird for Herb to want to put that stuff on his hamburger, but it’s also kind of weird that he’s eating a hamburger that’s roughly eighteen inches across, so who am I to say what’s normal in this scenario.

Mary Worth, 11/17/08

As a fan of laughably concretized metaphors, I’m glad to see that Lynn is shredding things, just like her father shreds her soul. I’ve had cats that dealt with life’s stresses in much the same way. Unfortunately, what with the strip’s typically inscrutable art, I can’t tell if she’s shredded the designer scarf daddy bought her for Christmas in July or just some random topo maps she keeps around for emo acting-out purposes. Anyway, I hope that she’s worked all this angst out of her system so that she can take off her casual purple lounging track suit and put on that kicky stripey blue t-shirt and face the world with a smile!

Gasoline Alley, 11/17/08

I can’t tell you why exactly, but after multiple Gasoline Alley storylines that I’ve more or less ignored completely, I’m suddenly riveted by the tale of Slim and Clovia’s financial woes. But Slim contemplating injuring himself terribly for money may have something to do with it.