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Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/1/09

What must it be like to be part of a couple in which both you and your spouse work in the demanding but rewarding medical field, with human lives literally in your hands, day after day? Since I’m a terrible person, I assume it mostly involves petty score-keeping. “Oh ho, Peter, it looks like you managed to kill someone — again — while I nobly went above and beyond the call of duty and found one of my missing patients just before she developed deadly pneumonia. Advantage: Becka!”

Family Circus, 12/1/09

I’m going to skip over Dolly’s chilling views on mother-daughter relationships (“I can’t believe she’s wasting her time talking to that old bag! When I grow up, I’m not even going to tell Mommy where I live!”) and focus on little Jeffy, wearin’ his best penny loafers and just stone cold maxin’ and relaxin’ in that doorway. I love the way he’s holding that book in his lap like a little table. Obviously he has some dim idea that education might be his ticket out of the Keane Kompound, but since literacy will be forever beyond his capabilities, he just grabbed a thin little brown volume (the Reader’s Digest abridged version of Leviticus, probably) from whatever shelf he could reach and carries it around the house with him, hoping it will help, somehow.

Mary Worth, 12/1/09

Mary’s expression of palpable and inappropriate relief may indicate that even a master meddler has her limits; even she doesn’t have the spiritual strength to deal with the emotional problems of a sad sack like Wilbur. “She’ll only be gone a few months, but who will wipe all this dirt off my face? I’m far too sad without her to deal with basic hygiene! Will you do it Mary? I think there are some towels over by the side of the pool.”

Dennis the Menace, 12/1/09

“An’ that’s why we’re buryin’ this snitch in a shallow grave.”

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Mary Worth, 11/30/09

At last, the long, dragged-out saga of Adrian and Scott and Adrian’s Hesitation To Love and Scott’s Many Bullet Wounds is over. (And how did you do in faithful reader 8th Man Fan’s pool? See the results online here, or download them in an OpenOffice or Microsoft Excel spreadsheet!) As is the style of this feature, the details of the new story will emerge at a Charterstone Pool Party, and I’m very excited to see that said new story will involve Mary’s long-neglected neighbor Wilbur Weston, who, for an extra added bonus, has just had his heart ripped from his sweaty, hairy chest (metaphorically), as his girlfriend has skipped town without him. I’m guessing that Mary is oh-no-ing not because Wilbur is sad (as Wilbur’s sadness is hilarious), but rather because, as Charterstone’s resident manager, she was supposed to make sure that Iris hadn’t trashed her apartment before leaving in the dead of night, as one might be prone to do after God knows how many months in a relationship with Wilbur Weston.

Anyhoo, today’s strip is quite satisfying not just because it presages Wilbur’s long-term humiliation, but because it features Ian Cameron in his most outrageous pool party outfit yet. He pays a lot in condo fees and works hard reading years-old lecture notes on Robert Burns to bored undergraduates, damn it, and he deserves to unwind a little, and if that means matching up a Hawaiian shirt, electric blue cargo shorts, white socks, and (invisible, but a pretty safe bet) Birkenstocks, then so be it. Toby has put on her most bland off-pink shirt-dress to make sure that nothing outshines her husband’s aggressive sartorial choices.

Wizard of Id, 11/30/09

Speaking of hirsute humanoids, today’s Wizard of Id contains what I’m pretty sure is another instance of a legacy strip forgetting its own gimmick. Perpetual prisoner Spook, I have always assumed, is portrayed as hairy because he’s been in a dank jail cell, forgotten by the outside world, for decades, and has never been allowed any kind of razor or scissors to cut his hair or otherwise groom himself because he might use them to commit suicide and end his torment. This strip, however, seems to imply that he’s not just someone with long, matted hair, but is rather a member of a particularly hairy hominid species; perhaps his detention is not a result of some long-ago act defined as a crime by Id’s repressive regime, but was dictated by racial purity laws that keep his kind out of the public’s sight. It may be that he is in fact the last of his race, which makes his request for the depiction of a comely she-Spook all the more poignant.

Mark Trail, 11/30/09

Oh, and speaking of soap strips changing storylines, usually in the transition between Mark Trail plots, Mark briefly revisits Lost Forest and spends a few days avoiding his wife’s marital advances before going out on another moronic assignment. Therefore, I’m assuming that what Rusty is warning Mark to LOOK OUT for in eight-gazillion point font is Cherry lying in wait on the side of the road in her attempt to sex-ambush him. On the other hand, they are near the ocean, so it’s possible that their car is coming under attack from a flock of vicious flying squid.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/30/09

Oh look, Peter the Sex Chameleon has made an appearance! He’s normally blond when interacting with his similarly fair wife, but can darken up when necessary to woo a raven-haired beauty. And now that he has encountered a rival for his wife’s affection, his hair has turned red, for anger! Tim’s going to need those throttling-and-punching skills soon enough.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/30/09

Funky is leading Les down into the basement so that he can feed him into the meat grinder and serve him as pepperoni on Montoni’s awful pizzas. Thus Funky Winkerbean’s feel-good holiday storyline begins!

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Mark Trail, 11/24/09

Rusty may be intensely stupid and hideously deformed, but he knows how the world — specifically, the world of Mark Trail — works. Having literally swung into action to defend an irritating puppy, Bob will have all of his past transgressions forgiven. Anyway, he was only killing and skinning gators to feed his family, as opposed to his more hirsute co-poachers, who were probably using the money to feed themselves, and whatever other non-related individuals they might share their backwoods shacks with, the greedy bastards. Rusty obviously doesn’t want Bob to labor under the misapprehension that there will be consequences for his actions, which is why he’s stage-whispering to Mark well within earshot in panel three.

Still, the point is largely moot, because nobody’s going to jail. Obviously there are no such things as “courts” or “police” or a “criminal justice system” or “institutions of government with a monopoly on legitimate violence” in Mark’s universe. There are only Mark’s fists and the righteous punishment they dish out. This explains why the poachers are just glumly sitting around the swamp; having been punched, their villainy has been drained away, and they are hollow of motivation and await further instructions.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/24/09

Cue may be intensely stupid and have dumb piercings, but give him this: he is a total fanatic about referring to his sad little trailer as his “crib.” Here, he almost seems to be using the word as an act of defiance: “Yeah, all you squares might look down your nose at ol’ Cue, just because I deal weed and hold old people for ransom. Well, you know what? I won’t use some bourgeois term for a dwelling, you hear me? I won’t! You can put me in jail, but you can’t stop me from calling my cell a ‘crib.'”

Apartment 3-G, 11/24/09

Well, it looks like the staff of I Dressed In The Dark met with complete and total failure in their attempt to gussy up Tommie. I visualize wave after wave of highly trained makeover artists charging at her, only to watch their best efforts vanish beyond Tommie’s event horizon of blandness. At least they convinced Ruby that her ridiculous hair ribbons should complement her outfit, rather than being the exact same color as everything else she has on.