Post Content

The thought of Gil Thorp hiring one of his student-athletes to kill someone has left me so reeling that I’m not going to get to Sunday’s comics until tomorrow, but I cannot deny the masses the weekly COMMENT OF THE WEEK!

“Oh, well. As someone once said, ‘Early to bed, early to rise, something, something, Mary Worth.'” –John C. Fremont

Also very funny: Runners-up.

“Well, it’s not like the Funky Winkerbean cast has anything better to do on a Sunday. I’ve never seen them in church, though the only reason any character would attend a service is to ask God to free them from life in that horrendously depressing strip.” –Jim

“My issue with the FOOB hybrid isn’t merely that it sucks. It’s that it’s lazy and it sucks.” –Allie Cat

“Jeffy may have some previously undiagnosed cognitive disabilities. And by ‘may have some,’ I mean ‘definitely has many.’ Jeffy is so frustratingly literal-minded that I can’t even envision him successfully selling lightbulbs door to door. He’d misunderstand the instructions and try to eat the lightbulbs or stick them up his nose or something. When brought to the emergency room, he’d say his grandmother told him to do it. So very sad.” –Joe Blevins

“I really love that whole family of crazy indeterminate ethnics.” –Dr. Mad, on the Malotte clan

“Maybe Gil Thorp would make more sense to me if I knew anything about sports. But probably not?” –Shmork

“Mary’s not checking the bylaws, she knows them. She has to get Board approval for the dog, and she’s checking her sheet of who owes her, cause nobody rides the Mary Advice Train for free.” –INotI

“I like that Mary has a couch large enough to seat eight but a coffee table barely big enough to set your drink down on. I imagine her apartment is full of many slightly surreal touches like that, to disorient her guests so they won’t notice when she lights them on fire.” –Tats

“Is anyone else freaked out by the fact that Gil seems to be making his team practice this new offense inside the locker room? No wonder these guys have trouble on the field. They’re too bruised and sore from skittering around the highly waxed locker room floor. Practice must sound like a pack of wild dogs trying to stand up on wood laminate.” –Terry C

“Okay, so here’s the plan, Persuader. I’m going to destroy the Bugle’s delivery infrastructure, sabotage the presses, scare away all the advertisers, make sure that no one buys that stinkin’ rag … then I want to buy it! …Wait. Hang on, that’s a terrible idea. Who the hell persuaded me that this was a good idea? …Persuader!” –Inspector Dim

“Pluggers is assuming that there are people out in America-land making recipes with ingredients that they cannot buy. ‘I made tahini-polenta enchiladas but I couldn’t find any tahini or polenta at the store, so I used mayonnaise and pancake mix instead.'” –rhymes with puck

“The problem with not getting Mary Worth in my local paper is that I can’t keep track of all the characters. Oh, wait. That’s a good thing.” –Concrete Queen

“Jeremy appreciates the Beatles for perfectly sensible qualities like chord progressions, harmonies, and lyrics. Then Walt barfs up some half-baked pseudo-musicological balderdash that probably wowed ’em back in ’79 when they were passing the bong around. And Jeremy says ‘Exactly!’ No, Jeremy, not ‘exactly.’ Walt’s statement isn’t ‘exactly’ anything. I don’t even think it’s ‘approximately’ anything.” –BlinkAndItsOver

“I suspect this condo board non-episode is a metaphor for what the sex in a relationship with Mary Worth would be like: a tiny bit of tease, no follow-through, and you’re left wondering why the hell the topic even came up in the first place.” –DaveyK

“At least that trout is pink on the outside, as opposed to Rex, the self-hating salmon.” –SecretMargo

“Wait, does that mean that plastic water bottles are not actually edible? Uh oh.” –Nekrotzar

“Sweet yellow coat, Tommie. Is it tweed? Does it match your best petticoat? Is that mustard or jaundice yellow? Purchased at Talbots two decades ago, perhaps? No? The ‘poor didn’t want these’ bin at Fraulein Maria’s abbey? Even Ruby looks upset by that coat and the woman wears giant bows in her hair like she’s a six-year-old in a Christmas pageant.” –kitty

“I really, really want to see Gil’s arrest for encouraging an already troubled youth into going on a murderous crime spree. But first, of course, I want to see that crime spree.” –True Fable

And we must give love to our advertisers, oh yes.

• The neuroses. The couch. The squiggles: Comedy Central’s first hit animated series — the Emmy and Peabody award-winning Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist — is now available in this epic thirteen-disc collection!
• Scratch Golfer: Got a golfer on your Christmas list? This book by faithful Comics Curmudgeon reader and contributor Wille Thompson is a devilishly funny book about life, business, and the golf match from Hell. It’s the perfect gift for your golfing friends, and signed, pre-publication copies are available up to December 20. Josh has read and APPROVES!
• Tin Man: A Sci-Fi Channel original mini-series. Premiers Sunday, December 2 at 9/8C.
• Have a Handmade Holiday!: Give the hottest handmade gifts this year! Totally unique hip & hot jewelry, killer ties for men, home Decor & iPod gear, unusual plushes, and more — the best gifts for our favorite people!
• Learn to draw the human figure: Acclaimed anatomy training course! Used by leading entertainment studios worldwide in 60 countries — the likes of LucasFilm, ILM, RedStorm, Midway, Blizzard. Learn to draw the human figure from your mind for illustration, comic books, manga, anime, game design, and all art fields.

To find out more about advertising on this site, click here.

Post Content

Well, here it is, the moment at least some of you have been waiting for: Mark Trail Theater on YouTube. I hope it doesn’t disappoint! We weren’t able to pull off the production values of those now-famous Mary Worth videos, so we went for campy. It’s going to be dark at first; stay with it.

(If you have a hard time seeing the projections, you might want to go directly to the video’s page on YouTube and watch it in full-screen mode.)

And now, some probably indulgent notes on the cast and production:

The play was part of a larger variety/talent show called Glitterama, which is put on by the zany Baltimore performance group Fluid Movement. We were one of the few acts that didn’t involve burlesque and/or semi-nudity (though on the first night after we left the stage there were calls for Mark Trail to “take it off”). It was very gratifying to hear everyone laughing in the audience, but we were fortunate to be the third act, and so they were all good and warmed up.

That’s my lovely wife Amber as poor neglected Cherry Trail in the first and last scenes, gamely wearing a curly wig, Keds, and (the ultimate sacrifice) mom jeans. She’s actually on the board of Fluid Movement, and at the last minute was roped into saying a few words about the group at the beginning of the show — in costume, of course. She’s a pro. She also was the driving force behind actually moving this thing from big talk on my part to reality (as she was for this very blog), and helped keep us organized as it progressed.

Our friend Sam only had a single line as Buck Jones at the very end, but he was a very crucial part of the production. He’s been reading soap opera strips for much longer than I have, and once we had settled on a plotline that we would use, he meticulously pieced together the panels to create the story and then wrote the script. And yes, other than the Sunday strip-style bear slander in the middle, virtually every line in this play is taken directly from the strip. He also wrote and performed that theme song, all by himself (the lyrics for which, if you have trouble hearing them, are “It’s the land of the beaver and bear/ And home of their friend Mark Trail/ Cherry and Andy and Rusty are there/ And all of the bad guys have facial hair/ In Lost Forest”). He also had valuable theater experience that kept us on track, and ran the slide projector during the performances.

Our friend Dave was for obvious reasons the only choice to play Mark Trail. I love the way he makes Mark so incredibly straight that he’s hilarious. He sunk so deep into his character that his wife (who is behind the camera here) forbade him to talk in the Mark Trail voice at home anymore. (Actual quote as we were helping clean up the backstage area, in Mark Trail voice: “If there’s one thing I hate more than bears, it’s litter.”) He was also great with props — for instance, he built that pup tent in a night when the Glitterama head honcho informed us that our previous effort (a tarp draped over some chairs) was sub-par.

Our friend Kaycee, who glams it up as Kelly Welly, was already a reader of my blog when she met my wife, and later realized who she was when some friends posted pictures of our wedding in the forum. Her camptastic Marilyn-Monroe-meets-Miss-Piggy version of Kelly’s voice (amplified by the hand mike so she could go for maximum breathiness) kept us on the verge of breaking up at all times, and some of the funniest little flourishes originated with her ad libs during rehearsal. She also provided costumes and props from her seemingly limitless supply, including the all-important bear suit.

Speaking of which … our friend Rupert did triple duty as Rusty, the arrow-ass bear (for whose ass we never got around to fashioning an arrow) and, in the final scene, Molly, all of which roles he embraced with total and deranged commitment, stealing everyone’s heart and mastering the quick change in the wings. My only regret about this video is that many of his awesome antics ended up just beyond the left side of the frame.

Our friend Kevin did a great job with the narration, making the whole bizarre thing sound official and halfway normal. The fake Sunday strip in particular got some of the biggest laughs of the night, not least because of his awesomely deadpan delivery.

And finally, that’s me dorking it up as both Bill Ellis and Ranger Rick Rogers. I find Kelly and the bear’s second entrance, during which I flail about desperately trying to figure out where I’m supposed to be standing on stage, particularly cringeworthy. At least at one point I got to walk off stage with a girl in one hand and a gun in the other — truly the dream of every American man.

Anyway, I’ll stop nattering on about this, but I really enjoyed putting this on with all these people. This video will obviously make you devastated that you missed it, but we’re already trying to figure out a venue for the next chapter of Mark Trail Theater: Molly Doesn’t Understand The Hostility! It will call for a higher special effects budget, obviously.

Post Content

I know I’ve been busy this weekend, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t diligently choose a COMMENT OF THE WEEK!

“Johnny goes through mustache wax like it’s going out of style. Which, coincidentally, it did, about 125 years ago.” –Tweeks_Coffee

And bravo to the runners up as well!

“I fear Judge Parker is leading us to a modern update of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Nuclear weapons are no longer the threat — now Klaatu/Sophie tells us, ‘Your climate is changing’ and warns us to mend our ways. But no, we won’t listen. I give it two weeks before Keith and his idling Hummer are destroyed by a rampaging Gort.” –dbp

“There are so many things out there that harm our youth today: drugs, guns, gangs, pasties flashed during the Super Bowl, Pokemon, that damn rap music … But it was hubris that took down poor Mike Patterson. Hubris, that overweening pride, that indomitable narcissism. Alas, poor Michael Patterson. Today I lay you down in a loamy grave with a foobish shovel. Rest in peace, young hooligan. The living do, indeed, bury the dead.” –Broken Skittles

“Vengeance? After witnessing plugger sex? Don’t be silly. You know full well you’ll be in holding yourself in the corner of a dark, cold room, whimpering softly and crouching in a puddle of your own tears.” –SNF

“‘There doesn’t seem to be any serious damage.’ YEAH, BECAUSE WHEN THERE IS, YOU USUALLY HEAR A KIND OF GRINDING NOISE WHEN I DO THIS TO ITS HEAD.” –SmartPeopleOnIce

“But now, I think [Mary Jane]’s about to emerge as an unexpected supervillainess. There’s a giant exoskeleton hidden under that bulky, unattractive, totally not-MJ sweater. Soon she will emerge as … The Lavender! Or … The Twin Set! Or … some other lame-ass Spidey comic strip type villain.” –Deborah

“You couldn’t find Exit 163B, and it was marked with big green signs. Good luck finding the g-spot, Casanova. Hopefully there’s a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves in the glove compartment.” –Joe Blevins

“The vet is totally putting the moves on Mary. (Ew! Ew! EW!) I don’t know if the funny pages can handle a Mary Worth who’s not having sex with TWO doctors at the same time.” –Meanwhile

“Could Mary Worth possibly be any more virtuous if she tried? She oozes moral rectitude from every pore of her unwrinkled flesh.” –Moss_Moses

“Marshmallows fresh from the back pocket, mmm yum! And their body heat will melt them to the degree they will be flat, sticky, and covered with pocket lint. Lint is like candy sprinkles to a Keane kid.” –True Fable

“At first glance, I thought the Family Circus kids were taking shots. Maybe they’ve invented some new drinking game where every time one of the kids says something banally funny you take a shot … or 12, depending on how much it hurts your soul.” –Chesnut

“I’ve gotta say, the sudden spurt of TDIET submissions based around the hospital leads me to hypothesize three equally depressing, yet equally likely theories: 1) the readership of the strip has a collective perpetual foot in the grave, 2) lonely, miserable, bedridden hospital patients have no better way to wile away their hours than to doodle comic strip ideas on the back of their napkins and sigh about lost time, or 3) the readership of TDIET frequently find themselves in the hospital due to the high blood pressure brought on by complaining about every last damn thing.” –Tats

“Mary’s face in panel two is like Christmas. It’s like her response to ‘All creatures great and small deserve our compassion’ is ‘I am familiar with this technique of saying things you can’t possibly mean in the most obsequiously bland way when you’re really about to wreak bloody, bloody vengeance upon themandohmygod, the vet and dog are GOING TO KILL ME. HELP. HELP. HELP.'” –kitty

“The reason you don’t see Sally’s mom in too many strips: she can’t stop looking at the camera. Notice that as it swoops around the pair from one side to the other, in the second panel the mom leans sharply to her right so her face doesn’t get blocked out. What we’re looking at was the nineteenth take, after the frustrated director walked off the set and the editor had to just pick the least awkward shot.” –Sobek

“I’m pretty well convinced that ‘Mitch’ is actually a young Slick Smitty. They both have the same stupid haircut and the same stupid grin. I keep expecting to see a narration box pop up: ‘Slylock Fox suspects that Mitch is lying through his teeth. What evidence suggests that he is not being honest about the iPod?’ And then an upside-down narration in small print: ‘Answer: Mitch has come to a bookstore for a meal, which clearly demonstrates that he has no understanding of how the traditional commercial system operates because he does all his business on the black market.'” –praepes

“In Bull Malone’s defense, both the kid and his boat are done up entirely in low-visibility marine camouflage and embedded in a dense cloud of waterfowl. Bull might just not have seen him. Avoiding the collision at the last second was plain good seamanship. And when he finds two guys standing on the dock, twiddling their thumbs and watching their precious vacation time tick away as they wait for someone with a boat to come along and take them to a hunting and fishing camp, what is he expected to do — leave them dangling there until Malotte’s kid finally shows up with ‘most of the water’ out of his boat, or extend some customer service and offer them a ride himself? Bull is just showing good business sense, I say. Sorry, Johnny Malotte! The cutthroat, take-no-prisoners environment of wilderness resort competition is no place for the likes of you. Good thing you have so many kids; the strong market for healthy kidneys should keep you going for a while.” –Joe Btfsplk

“Eventually, Wilson & Barreto are just going to spin off a strip called Trudy’s Ass, aren’t they?” –Keg of Curd

“I didn’t think Mary could be any more insufferably full of herself until she decided to award herself a goddamn Nobel Prize for bringing a dog to the vet.” –rhymes with puck

In other news, I’m sad to see Mark Trail Theater come to an end, though it was a fairly exhausting weekend. Faithful reader Little Red-haired Girl and her husband (aka our neighbors Kathleen and Emil) where very kind to bring us roses at the final performance! Here I am showing them off and looking pleased but zonked out:

Yes, I shaved for the performance — after all, I wasn’t playing a villain and I didn’t want Mark to start punching me uncontrollably. And that stick was an important prop! I did get to chat with several faithful readers — Minivet, Susie, and Nellie — at the Saturday shows — lovely people all! Anyone I missed talking to, please speak up in the comments! And now I’ll shut up about it all except to say that it was captured on video, and if all goes well I’ll upload it to YouTube sometime this week, at which time I’ll go on at great further length.

Oh, and before I sign off, I need to direct your attention to the the FOOBiverse Journal, that home for vitriol against all things FBOFWish, where the blogger all last week was none other than faithful reader True Fable, who, if he said anything about it here, I’m very sorry to have not noticed it.

And finally, I must as always throw some love at our advertisers:

• Scratch Golfer: Got a golfer on your Christmas list? This book by faithful Comics Curmudgeon reader and contributor Wille Thompson is a devilishly funny book about life, business, and the golf match from Hell. It’s the perfect gift for your golfing friends, and signed, pre-publication copies are available up to December 20. Josh has read and APPROVES!
• Learn to draw the human figure: Acclaimed anatomy training course! Used by leading entertainment studios worldwide in 60 countries — the likes of LucasFilm, ILM, RedStorm, Midway, Blizzard. Learn to draw the human figure from your mind for illustration, comic books, manga, anime, game design, and all art fields.
• Have a Handmade Holiday!: Give the hottest handmade gifts this year! Totally unique hip & hot jewelry, killer ties for men, home Decor & iPod gear, unusual plushes, and more — the best gifts for our favorite people!

To find out more about advertising on this site, click here.