Post Content

Mary Worth, 2/7/10

Uh oh — it looks like Dawn isn’t going to sit back just acquiesce to losing her father’s affections to some scam artist! It seems that she is going to try shock therapy by finding the one person who can be guaranteed to terrify Wilbur back to his senses: erstwhile romantic rival Martin Clark. Sure, he’s been dead for years, but that will make the ultimate confrontation all the more harrowing, as Dawn rigs up the rich man’s corpse to move and speak like a marionette. “Look at me, Wilbur!” Martin will say, thanks to the ventriloquist lessons Dawn’s been taking on the sly. “I’m a charred, reassembled cadaver, and yet Abby would still choose me over you!”

Blondie, 2/7/10

This right here is seven panels of Superbowl Sunday inanity punctuated by one glorious moment of complete madness. I suppose that longtime readers of Blondie are supposed to know that spinning around on one’s head is an indicator of extreme, uncontrollable emotion of some kind, but to the casual viewer, it would just appear that Dagwood, Herb, and Daisy have chosen to express their football-related outrage with a stunning display of eerily synchronized breakdancing. Which I for one am totally in favor of.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/7/10

You know who I just realized that I totally don’t get at all? Berna! She’s Rex and June’s receptionist and she runs a successful salon of some sort and she uses Yugoslav generalissimo Tito’s recipes to dominate the local restaurant scene? Why would such a power broker need a relatively menial job behind a clinic’s front desk? Perhaps she uses it to drum up business for her salon. “Honey, trust me, Western medicine can’t do a thing about those split ends. Here’s my number.”

Meanwhile, I look forward to seeing how this strip attempts to make a guy named “Toots” who has a stripey rugby shirt, a goofy little beard, and a lot of hair gel into some kind of threat against Rex and June’s carefully constructed bourgeois order.

Marvin, 2/7/10

Since we only get a single glimpse of Marvin’s dad in this strip, in which he appears to be a good 15 or 20 feet away from his terrible little son and not getting any closer, I’m guessing this is less “father/son bonding” and more “let’s bring the hateful monster outside and leave him there until he ‘accidentally’ freezes to death.”

Post Content

Mark Trail, 1/29/10

I’m hoping that this Mark Trail storyline might be about to turn into Brokeback Mountain meets The Larry Craig Story. “An ‘old friend,’ Ben Harris, has a camp up ahead … I don’t think he’s going to be too happy with me, bringing a handsome young man like yourself along with me!” “It has been a long time, Senator … you’re looking good … so good … and you’re bringing someone else here … to our special place …” *sob*

Mary Worth, 1/29/10

Now, this is the point where all you cynics are going to say, “Ha ha, see, Kurt was lying all along!” That’s nonsense. If a scam artist were confronted with a request for a paternity test, they’d probably sputter and prevaricate. They certainly would not unleash a clipped “I don’t believe in their accuracy.” Thus, I am forced to conclude that Kurt is not a con man; he is a cyborg.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/29/10

Rex and June begin to suspect that Sarah is on to their plan to drop her off at a farm upstate and never come back.

Post Content

Family Circus, 1/24/10

I’m pretty sure that the panels here have been both mislabelled and put in the wrong order. Our story begins in panel two, which is the moment when Mommy realizes that she needs to leave her kiddie-vomit-smeared life behind her, forever. In panel one, she wakes up alone in a single bed in some fleabag hotel, grateful to be forever free of her suffocating family. Among the responsibilities she’s left behind is hygeine, and in panel three her fellow elevator passengers take disapproving note of her noticable body odor. To her, that funk smells like freedom, sweet freedom.

Beetle Bailey, 1/24/10

The reasons why the soldiers of Camp Swampy would want to stand by and cheer as their seargant suffers physical pain should be obvious. But what’s with the rigamarole with his being ordered into the dentist chair? Does it serve any purpose other than to turn the perfectly servicable daily strip represented by the bottom row of panels into a Sunday strip? My guess is that odor of Sarge’s decaying teeth and putrefying gums was becoming so noticeable and distracting that his dental health had to be improved in the interest of maintaining unit cohesion.

Funky Winkerbean, 1/24/10

“Yeah, you kids today and your moral ambiguity! In our days, heroes were heroic, like Speedball, who’s named after an awesome combination of heroin and cocaine!”

Panels from Dennis the Menace, 1/24/10

Sorry, Dennis, the only way these lines might qualify as “menacing” would be if afterwards you headed down to the graveyard to find some well preserved corpse bits to piece together.

Panels from Rex Morgan, M.D., and Judge Parker, 1/24/10

Fun fact that newcomers to the soap opera comic scene might not know: Judge Parker and Rex Morgan have different artists, but are both written by the same guy, Woody Wilson. I’m assuming that his scripts for both strips today included prominent use of the phrase “ass crack.”