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Mary Worth, 12/20/07

Sadly, rules about depicting animal violence prevent us from seeing the bloody glory of this little-dog-on-littler-dog battle, but it’s obvious that Chester won, since his Margo Magee lookalike owner had to fish him out of the fighting pit. The motion lines in panel one also make it look like Mary just backhanded her nemesis in the back of the head for good measure. But for my money the greatest thing about this comic is the wordless exclamation point Mary is emitting in the second panel. It’s clear that nobody has told Mary that anything was her fault, ever. Watch out, fur-collared-coat lady! Mary got a bunch of her friends together to help her talk a guy into suicide once, and his crimes were clearly nothing compared to you attempting to cast blame on the Queen of Charterstone.

Marmaduke, 12/20/07

Marmaduke’s troubling slide into insanity accelerates. Never mind the fact that if Marmaduke wasn’t sitting, he’d just be running around and destroying things, and possibly humping his owner’s hapless guest; his sitting would probably be less intrusive if the various pieces of furniture in the living room were, you know, more than eight inches apart.

Crankshaft, 12/20/07

I’m always kind of interested in the flashback scenes in Crankshaft. This woman is (if I have the family relationships right, which I’m still not 100 percent sure that I do) the ’Shaft’s daughter, so it’s intriguing to see the man’s family when he was younger and maybe not so cranky and HOLY GOD WHAT ON EARTH IS THAT THING IN FRONT OF THE LITTLE GIRL’S FACE IN THE THIRD PANEL WHERE THE HELL IS HER MOM SHOPPING FOR ORNAMENTS HOLY CRAP!

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Mary Worth, 12/16/07

We’ve seen this enormous concrete staircase to nowhere before in Mary Worth. When it last appeared at a Charterstone pool party, I speculated that it led to a platform for human sacrifice. But perhaps it will actually turn out to be the spot where tiny dogs battle it out for tiny dog supremacy over Charterstone. I can just see Mary being the type to be all sweetness and light and Leo Buscaglia quotes before Chester loses in a fight, and then her love for him vanishes in a puff of disgust when she sees that her dog is a cowardly cur. Only the toughest gets to hold coveted title of Mary’s Dawg!

A more pleasant possibility is that the top of the stairs will serve as the stage for the incident that will forever go down in Charterstone lore as The Humping. Mary, having never experienced or even seen actual sexual contact before, will simply faint dead away.

Apartment 3-G, 12/16/07

Oh, Margo! So unused to being denied what you want for any length of time, you can’t help but race to the finish line the moment the L-bomb is dropped. I’d feel bad for you if you weren’t a preening, narcissistic sociopath with the blood of who knows how many innocents on your hands.

Eric’s fish-lipped look of horror in the final panel is definitely one of this strip’s classic moments. “Gosh, I always thought the moment I got engaged would feel … more special,” he seems to be thinking. “And I certainly didn’t think it would involve anyone dressed like Han Solo.”

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Judge Parker, 12/9/07

OK, Judger Parker, we get it, we get it. There’s something significant about these damn brownies, seeing as the dialog and the authorial gaze has lingered on them for most of this week. If this were an exciting strip, they’d be laced with knockout drugs so that Abbey’s plane-flying, chicken-growing neighbors could kidnap her for their nefarious purposes, or perhaps some kind of mind-control serum so that they could force her to do her bidding. But this is Judge Parker, so perhaps the message they’re trying to get across is that “brownies are yummy.”

Mary Worth, 12/8/07

Chester the dog: Hero, or greatest hero in American history?

Panel from Spider-Man, 12/8/07

Not to get ahead of myself on the comments of the week, but nothing I could say about this awesome panel can possibly match this from faithful reader Gold-Digging Nanny:

The comics syndicate should just eliminate Spider-Man’s bio from their website and substitute today’s panel two. That’s all you ever need to know about Spider-Man.