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Archie, 9/4/09

For a brief moment here, I’m actually feeling kind of bad for Reggie, who is apparently fanatically committed to his role as Riverdale’s #1 asshole. Check out his theatrically prickish expression in the third panel; he’s giggling at his own obnoxiousness so gleefully, he’s about to sprain his face.

Mark Trail, 9/4/09

So, since we met our noble but unemployed backwoodsman, he’s spent most of his time being lobbied heavily by the local sideburn brigade to take up a life of crocodile poaching. But is the illicit crocodile trade really such a bad thing? Maybe not, for those who decide to venture into the swamps bringing tender and delicious little dogs along with them! Prepare to see Rusty and Mark’s fishing trip to go off without incident, since all the giant terror reptiles determined to eat Sassy have long been transformed into handbags, with Mark bellowing “Thanks for the help, illegal poachers!” as they had back to Lost Forest.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/4/09

Oh, Berna, you can keep repeating your questions in simpler and simpler words all you like, but Becka seems to have downed several glasses of wine while waiting for her noodles to be individually hand-crafted back in the kitchen, and has pretty much stopped making sense. Even basic subject-verb agreement is beyond her. “Woman are drawn to Peter! Peter are … handsome man! God, I love him, that dirty, dirty bastard … so handsome … where’s the breadsticks? I never got my breadsticks! You get breadsticks at the Olive Garden … fuck Tito and his sauce. Wait, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, Peter. He thinks he’s so great! Just because he’s attractive … and gifted … and charming … hold on, I think I’m gonna puke.”

Marmaduke and Family Circus, 9/4/09

Ha ha, Marmaduke and Jeffy are planning to “borrow” foodstuffs, and then return them, after they come out of their buttholes.

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Crock, 9/2/09

My maternal grandmother grew up on a farm in Oklahoma, and after a brief but exciting (and husband-netting) stint working in Los Angeles during World War II, moved to a very small town in Ohio where she would live for the rest of her life. She was never an early adopter when it came to gadgetry and was in fact pretty technophobic — I’ll always remember when, as a teenager, I tried for the third or fourth time to explain to her what the buttons on her VCR did, and said “It’s just like on a cassette player!” and she admitted that she had never figured out how to work her cassette player either. That said, one futuristic appliance that she did buy before anyone else I knew was a microwave oven. I literally cannot remember a time when her beloved “micro” wasn’t on its little stand next to her kitchen table, which means that she must have bought it by 1982 or so at the latest. And it kept right on working, as near as I can remember, until she passed away in 1998, an awful good run for an appliance (and a marked contrast with my current microwave, which we got as wedding present less than four years ago and which is already flaking out, though that’s a rant for a different time and place, the place presumably being a long, detailed diatribe to be sent registered mail to the Panasonic Corporation). Perhaps one of the reasons that my grandmother, who was born in 1922, was able to easily integrate this modern wonder into her workflow was that all of its features were controlled by knobs, like the conventional oven that she was already familiar with, but unlike, say, every microwave sold anywhere for the last fifteen to twenty years.

In case you’re wondering what the point of all this is, I’m trying to say that the creators of Crock are unfathomably old.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/2/09

Rex Morgan didn’t waste any time taking story elements that should be interesting — the plight of our seniors, a marriage troubled by adulterous yearnings — and making them incredibly boring, so boring that these ladies eating out at some midscale Italian place actually means that things are looking up. I’m sure that I’m going to get dozens of irate letters defending the genius of various Italian grandmothers for this, but alfredo sauce, satisfying as it almost always is, doesn’t really leave tons of room for subtle, secert variations, in my experience. It’s pretty much just cheese, cream, garlic, and butter, right? Still, deceased Yugoslav President for Life Tito’s recipe must have been pretty good to get Berna free restaurant meals out of it; or, alternately, it may have been actively poisonous, which would explain why Berna looks like a deranged serial killer in panel two, and why Becka calls it “wicked.”

Apartment 3-G, 9/2/09

Speaking of rapid descents into boring, it’s taken only 48 hours for the Professor to botch his potentially interesting prescription drug abuse storyline by maundering off into a bunch of snoozeville blah blah about Greek surnames. That knocking at the door is an Apartment 3-G producer, come to tell the Professor that his tryout as a central character is now concluded, and to remove him with an enormous vaudeville-style hook if he doesn’t come quietly.

Dennis the Menace, 9/2/09

Either that or he’s decided to skip “menacing” and head straight on into “troubling paranoia.”

Hi and Lois, 9/2/09

While I don’t condone property destruction to prove a point, it is worth noting that Trixie has been the same height since this strip debuted in 1954. She’s probably not getting any taller, and it’s about time the family recognized that and added some accommodations in their home for her condition.

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Mary Worth, 8/18/09

See, this is what keeps drawing me back to Mary Worth year after year — the brief moments of terror amid the long stretches of boredom. Panel two seems to lurch at us directly out of some Escherian nightmare, with Delilah’s head and Lawrence’s hand looming impossibly large for the relative distances established in the first panel. And artistic trauma aside, I’m unsettled by Lawrence’s instinct to muffle whatever mildly simpering response Delilah’s about to come up with. “When we have kids, I’ll want to spend time raising them. It’s a more important job.” “I feel the same! But what about the loss of incMMMMFFFF!” “Hush, my beauty. I SAID I’LL BE SPENDING MY TIME RAISING THEM WHILE YOU LOOK ON IN ADORING SILENCE!”

Mark Trail, 8/18/09

Oh, bitter irony! Having trained for so long to merely wound and scare with his gun, our rifleman finds himself unable to finish off Mark, and instead sets loose an avalanche of toxic waster barrels that will crush him to pulp. Of course, if my many years of reading comics have taught me anything, it’s that the noxious chemicals will preserve his mangled body and grant him terrifying superpowers. Mark will return to his cabin with his usual smug grin, unaware that Lost Forest is being stalked by a monstrous orange supervillain: The Near Misser!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/18/09

If Becka’s look of mounting anxiety in the third panel is any indication, this half-assed flirting is going even worse than I had feared. “Oh, God, fly fishing? Really? This is awful. I gotta find one of those depressing demented people to chat with.”

Apartment 3-G, 8/18/09

Actually, Lu Ann, I think it’s more accurate to say that Tommie is socially awkward.