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Mary Worth, 4/1/07

Ah, a Charterstone pool party! Always a nexus of pettiness and backhanded sniping, and always an excellent opportunity for Professor Chinbeard to make an ass out of himself. Usually he achieves this goal by insulting people behind their backs or attacking those who dare to show an ounce of compassion for others, but he’s more than happy to blatantly ogle the troubled, mousy new girl in front of his wife if that’s what it takes. It’s a good thing he wore his sexiest rust-colored leisure suit and inky black shirt for the occasion!

It’s hard to know what’s going on in Vera’s head, since she’s so impossibly subdued and guarded, but I’m guessing it’s something like, “Yep, this is exactly what I was afraid this scene was going to be like.”

Mark Trail, 4/1/07

Meanwhile, Mark Trail is either very, very high, or about four years old. This is the only explanation I can offer for what we see here today. “Did you know … SUNSPOTS! They make … pretty girls in bikinis … and planes and dolphins and whales OUT OF CONTROL! And then the pelican made a big hurricane … WHOOOSH. That’s why we built this huge crystal rocket ship in Washington, D.C.! WE’RE GOING TO THE SUN TO FIGHT THE SUNSPOTS! HOORAY!”

The Phantom, 4/1/07

Hmm, it looks like “DePaul & Ryan,” who’ve been drawing the daily Phantom for a while now, have taken over the Sunday duties from Graham Nolan. It’s too bad, as I’ve been a fan of Nolan’s work in this setting, but now he’ll have more energy to lavish on June Morgan’s breasts (he’s the RMMD artist too). Anyway, today’s new adventure belies the notion that Bangalla is a happy, healthy post-colonial democracy. People walking with a suitcase at night, in the same neighborhood as the presidential palace? They must be … suspects! Some quality time down at the police station with a rubber hose will loosen their tongues and establish exactly why we should be suspicious of them!

Also today, a couple of throwaway panels of note:

Panel from For Better Or For Worse, 4/1/07

If you looked at this in your paper today and recoiled in horror but then consoled yourself by saying, “Well, at least nobody recorded this and then uploaded the MP3 to the official FBOFW site,” then I’m about to shatter your world of complacency into countless shards of anguish (note: don’t click this link unless you want to explain to anyone within earshot why you’re listening to FBOFW-themed “rock” music).

Panels from Dennis the Menace, 4/1/07

It may not be menacing as such, but it’s at least a little disturbing to see Joey and Dennis contemplate the tempting target that is Mr. Wilson’s enormous ass.

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Mark Trail, 3/11/07

Holy smokes, this is one of the bestest “Mark Trail Teaches You About Nature And Crap” Sunday Mark Trails ever! None of the usual “Aren’t animals interesting/endangered/cute” nonsense today; instead, we get a crazed gang of killer elephants, harassing a pair of fleeing stereotypically garbed natives, flinging some red-shirted white dude across the savannah, and molesting a field of innocent sweet potatoes like so many 15,000-pound gophers. Mark himself, who usually strolls fearlessly into the frame to narrate as his chosen beast of the week menaces the nameless extras who are clearly desperate to break into the comics, has wisely chosen to stay safely off-camera when it comes to the tusked menace that is the elephant.

I’m guessing that the strong elephantaphobic slant of today’s strip was made possible from a large check from the International Federation of Ivory Harvesting Professionals.

For Better Or For Worse, 3/11/07

Yes, the whole point of this overcontrived family drama was to make John think that his wife was shaving her nether parts in front of several of her children; and yes, it’s both horrifying and kind of shamefully funny. I mostly want to point the second panel, which would make an excellent LiveJournal icon to sit atop the phrase “Mood: Suicidal”.

The Phantom, 3/11/07

I haven’t been covering the current Sunday Phantom storyline at all, because it’s pretty dull; it has centered some kind of weird temporal anomaly that has allowed the Ghost-Who-Violates-The-Laws-Of-Physics to interact with a group of gangsters from the ’30s who have been trying to stop a thinly veiled Amelia Earhart stand-in from making an historic flight of some sort. I’m kind of intrigued by the last panel, in which the very married Big Purple Guy allows the comely aviatrix to rest a hand on his enormous left pectoral muscle; I guess his logic is, “Hey, it’s 1937, I’m not going to be married for about 50 years, so anything goes!”

(UPDATE: Thanks to several commentors who pointed out to me that “Beryl Markham” is not actually some made-up character meant to avoid a lawsuit from Amelia Earhart’s estate, but a real person who actually lived in East Africa. I never should have doubted this, as the Phantom’s devotion to authenticity is notorious. Also, time travel is real.)

Curtis, 3/11/07

I could point out that Gunk’s “balloons” look remarkably like condoms, or that while “FOOO!” is a legitimate onomatopoeia, “TWIST!”, “BEND!”, and “SHAPE!” are not. My main concern, however, is that Gunk has used his devilish Flyspeck Island powers to create living beings out of inanimate matter, only to force them to end their short lives in a mercy killing and suicide. The face-flop is a usual exaggerated Curtis response to a joke, but here I hope that our protagonist is weeping openly at the sadistic little performance he was just forced to watch.

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Family Circus, 3/8/07

Man, does the total and constant humiliation of Jeffy ever get old? I’m going to go ahead and say “no.” In a normal human family, Grandma would have probably sent clothes a few sizes too big in the expectation that her grandson would soon grow into them; however, since Jeffy’s been the same height for decades and shows no sign of getting any taller, we have to assume that her aim was to drive him ever deeper into self-loathing.

The Phantom, 3/8/07

So the Phantom is in the midst of an incredibly dull storyline involving the kidnapping of Old Man Mozz and some bank robbers who want the seer to [Note: Rest of recap cut because of extreme dullness. –Eds.] Anyway, I’d just like to point out that Kono slipping and falling on the steps of the bank he’s attempting to rob, followed by him cracking his dreadlocked skull open as his eyes roll back in his head, is a pretty gruesome image for the funny pages.

And where is our purple-clad, stripy-butt hero in all of this? Last we saw him, he was lounging in a jungle clearing while his cone-headed midget sidekick was napping on top of an elephant. No, really.

Pluggers, 3/8/07

You heard it here first, people: The only choice available for the radio-listening plugger is “AM” or “FM.” What, you also want to be able to change channels within each band? What are you, some kind of chardonnay-swilling East Coast liberal elitist? In this sense, plugger radios are like the one available in Nazi Germany, which were also pre-set to a single station. Although my guess is that pluggers listen to a lot fewer hateful rants about how the Jews are undermining the purity of the master race and a lot more hateful rants about how the Cowboys really need to get more free agent help for their offensive line.

I also note that today’s featured plugger has been banished out of the house entirely, presumably so that his radio listening doesn’t distract his she-plugger mate from her “stories.” Either that, or all his furniture has been repossessed and a tree stump is a “plugger easy chair.”

They’ll Do It Every Time, 3/8/07

The looks of pure joy on the faces of Loopina’s parents in the first panel at the prospect of a Loopina-free evening are only matched by the wave of obscenity-tinged bile we get in the second. It seems that her parents don’t really like her very much, though that should have been obvious from the mere fact that they named her “Loopina.”