Post Content

Mary Worth, 12/2/04

“Sure, I’ve been married for years, now, but … hey, yoga instructor! Bendy!”

Post Content

Well, no doubt like many of you, I got swept up in holiday madness last week, and am still playing catch-up in the non-gorging-on-turkey aspects of my life. What with the two Thanksgiving dinners, the Christmas gift exchange with the cousins, the rousing chorus of folk songs from the labor movement, the avant-garde play performed by elementary school children, and the specter of 24 straight hours of uncontrollable vomiting hanging over it all (what, your week wasn’t like that?) I haven’t had time to read the comics so you don’t have to. In both the spirit of the holiday and a desperate attempt to play catch-up, I offer you a week’s worth of comics and corresponding sentence-long things that I’m thankful for.

B.C., 11/23/04

I’m thankful that B.C., having already pissed off both Muslims and Jews, is now going after the Irish, ensuring its departure from the comics pages any day now.

Dilbert, 11/24/04

I’m thankful that public discourse has coarsened to the extent that the phrase “cow’s butt” can now be printed in the comics pages, because I think cow butts are funny.

Beetle Bailey, 11/25/04

I’m thankful that Beetle Bailey has discovered postmodernism, at long last.

Mary Worth, 11/26/04

I’m thankful for Boston, because they rock, man.

Family Circus, 11/27/04

I’m thankful that at least one member of this family is beginning to question the oppressive patriarchal suburban hell in which she lives.

Doodles by Mac and Sack, 11/28/04

I’m thankful that Mac and/or Sack were polite enough to add “please” to their request that I add horns and a bell to the grazing bovine in the bottom middle panel, though I admit that I could have done without the freakish hula-hooping cow above it.

Kudzu, 11/29/04

I’m thankful to Bill O’Reilly, who’s provided days and days of jokes to desperate comic strips everywhere.

B.C., 11/30/04

And now the handicapped. Yep, any day now…

Oh yeah, and one last thing I’m thankful for is this Jonathan Franzen essay about Peanuts from the New Yorker. It’s, like, good and stuff.

Post Content

Mary Worth, 11/17/04

It’s now obvious that Mary Worth is an addict. She’s not addicted to crystal meth, like some people we could mention, of course. No, hers is a more psychological addiction. In today’s strip, we learn that Mary Worth is addicted to drama.

The King Features marketing blather about Mary Worth says “The reader is asked to remember that Mary Worth stories are not about Mary. They are about a continuing parade of people who enter Mary’s life.” You know: cranky old restaurateurs, violent English professors and the co-eds who love them, tweakers. This bit of ad copy glosses over an important fact, though: how does it just happen that all this fascinating human pageantry takes place in Mary’s apartment complex?

Now we see the truth: kindly old Mary Worth is really a Machiavellian puppet master, callously using her deep insights into human nature to manipulate her neighbors into deeply inadvisable courses of action. In today’s strip, Mary is urging one of her neighbors to go after a married man. There’s no other way to interpret this. Oh, sure, she’s covering her tracks with “not as a romantic pursuit,” but really, how many of you would receive a phone call from an old flame telling you that you were someone he or she “still cares and thinks about” and not think the worse (or best, depending on your point of view)? For God’s sake, look at her face! Look at the way she’s crossing her scheming fingers! She’s practically salivating at the thought of the romantic carnage she’s about to unleash! Oh, the shame!

Incidentally, here’s another fun line from the King Features site: “Contrary to popular belief, Mary Worth is not a continuation of the Depression Era favorite Apple Mary.” Never has the word “popular” been so sorely misused.