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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.

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Mark Trail, 8/16/09

Ah, there’s nothing more relaxing in your Sunday Mark Trail than seeing terrified horses running from an all-consuming inferno! This week’s edutaining Sunday strip reminds me of why I find Smokey the Bear so unsettling, which is because he’s wearing pants and no shirt. I can sort of see the chain of logic that got clothes on him in the first place — they had to put the hat on him to show that he was a forest ranger, and then once that happened he was a little too anthropomorphized to get away with no pants; I just don’t understand why the thought process stopped there. Surely there’s some sort of snappy uniform shirt they could have put on him? Because as it is he sort makes me think that forest rangers used to lounge around their fire towers shirtless, like slobs, which makes me glad that they all got fired due to budget cuts and replaced by people calling on their cell phones and saying “Hey, is this the government? I, uh, I think your forest is on fire.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/17/09

I’ve been avoiding talking about Rex Morgan because I or someone I love losing their memory and forgetting who all their loved ones are is one of my very worst nightmares; and so, grasping at straws, I’m willing to accept this half-hearted conversation as a sign that we’re getting back to what I thought this storyline was all about, which is to say adultery, and suspicions of adultery. Normally I don’t root for uninteresting, semi-attractive people to flirt in the comics, but if it takes panel time away from “I don’t know who I am or where I am and I think I’m married to this person who isn’t my husband, ha ha,” then I’m all for it.

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Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois, 7/16/09

Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois may share the same offices over at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC (in a low-slung business park, just off the interstate), but that doesn’t mean that they march in creative lockstep! That’s particularly clear today. Beetle Bailey uses Otto, the strip’s most intelligent and self-reflective character, to contemplate serious philosophical questions. Since he’s a dog, one could say that he was put into this world to bark; yet, like so many of us, he suffers a crisis of identity, a belief that even the actions that reflect his innermost nature are ultimately unrewarding and unrewarded. One is reminded of Arjuna expressing his doubts in the Bhagavad Gita, before going into battle; however, whereas Arjuna had Krishna to explain to him the spiritual importance of fulfilling one’s dharma, or duty, Otto has no teacher or framework to show him the essential value of barking. In this way he is like us, who toil away in alienated post-capitalism, unsure of the larger connection between what we do and the world we would like ideally to help build.

Hi and Lois, meanwhile, takes a different tack. Did you know that vomiting is funny, and that babies are prone to vomiting? The first panel is a little crude artistically, but seeing as it’s probably the first point-of-view depiction in a nationally syndicated comic strip of what it’s like to have someone puke into your face, we should probably cut it a little slack.

Phantom, 7/16/09

Oh, hey, what’s going on over in the Phantom, where we’re being shown how the first two lady Jungle Patrolpersons are fitting in to this elite paramilitary unit? Well, the lady cop patrolhuman has been enlisted for her helicoptering skills, and has picked up the Unknown Commander from an urban location, from whence he had unceremoniously nabbed a suspect out of his own home. Now she’s dropped them off in an isolated rural area, where, without any wimpy liberal niceties like a trial, he will presumably be viciously attacked by a wolf or just shot in the back of the head. And our heroine’s main goal throughout has been to get a look at this human rights abuser’s handsome face. Ha ha, women, am I right, people?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/16/09

Hey, remember how the new Rex Morgan, M.D., plot was going to be some sexy story about adultery? In classic bait-and-switch fashion, it turns out that the promise of extramarital relations and the drama they cause was just to lure you into reading about something much more important, and depressing, namely the poor care that people with Alzheimer’s receive. Becka has been shocked — shocked! — to find that a private clinic is interested in cutting costs, even if that means lowering the quality of medical attention given to its paying customers! As we learn in today’s strips, the clinic’s revenue-generating ideas push the boundaries of medical ethics: they’ve set up an “Alzheimer’s enclosure” at the zoo, near the primate house, where members of the public can buy tickets to come and gawk.