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Mary Worth, 6/9/07

Ah, what a revealing sibling diptych in the wake of the meeting that was so long in coming! On the right, we have Vera, brought to spasms of uncontrollable weeping as years of suppressed emotion wrench their way out of her soul. On the left, we have Von, who’s head is vaguely itchy. Remember, kids: alcohol is your ticket out of undesirably intrusive emotional experiences!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/9/07

Man, for a guy who thinks his friend’s husband is long dead in the icy North Atlantic, Rex is sure looking cheery in panel two. “Yeah, why don’t you go over and console Heather, soothe her grief, do woman stuff, whatever … while I get the house all to myself! For me and anyone I want to invite over. Lucky for me I wore my grooviest shirt today!”

Hi and Lois, 6/9/07

Dude, child labor is so much cheaper!

Apartment 3-G, 6/9/07

Sleepy, disheveled, nighty-clad Margo? Bliss. Sleepy, disheveled, nighty-clad, ragingly self-absorbed Margo? Rapture.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/29/07

Ha ha! Awww, Rex doesn’t like mean ol’ Hugh! Rex thinks Hugh’s a bad son! Plus Hugh was not nice to Rex! So Rex has busted out the angry face! It’s OK, Rex, it’s OK, Heather’s got the situation in hand now. Put down the celery before you hurt somebody with it.

Archie, 5/29/07

That Archie! You can totally tell why all the girls are always fighting over him. He’s thrown into a state of naked panic and despair whenever he has to make the simple kinds of choices necessary to function as a human being in society! Speaking of which…

For Better Or For Worse, 5/29/07

For whatever reason — residual affection for a strip I liked in my youth, some vague desire to keep a hold of my dignity — I always feel like I need to step back from full-throated Foob hate, so I’ll try to keep this as rational as possible. It is, in fact, true that buying a house a huge leap, a stressful responsibility. It’s natural to worry that, if your financial situation changes, you might not only lose the house, but all the money you’ve invested in it to that point — a worry that might be all the keener if a big part of your income comes from freelancing and is thus not predictable. And then there are the little costs, like maintenance, that would normally be your landlord’s responsibility that suddenly you have to cover. It’s a Big Deal.

And yet exactly none of this has actually been discussed in the strip. We don’t know why Mikey is so freaked out about buying the house; as far as I can tell, he’s just sitting under some kind of smoldering cloud of existential dread about it. It’s not like he even really had to decide to do it — with the fire and his parents’ machinations, it’s like the choice was made for him! (In real life, this could of course be the very cause of his unease, but again if that’s the case, nothing has been said to that effect.) Today we learn that Mike is in such a state about the prospect of property ownership that he wants to punish his body until his mind shuts down. The turn to booze and drugs is inevitable. If Mike spends all his days in the coming frozen-in-time version of the strip in some sort of dreamy opium haze, every Foob outrage we have suffered to this point will have been worth it.

Judge Parker, 5/29/07

If you’re sympathizing with Sam’s hair-pulling panic in panel three (“The ladies, they’ll just go out with that credit card and come back with three new dresses they don’t need! And an apartment in Paris! Am I right, fellas?”), I must remind you that all of the fabulous wealth that keeps this motley family in the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed at stately Spencer Farms is Abbey’s (inherited, I believe). Perhaps he’s worried that any pinch on the family finances will reveal that his claims to be contributing with his big-shot lawyer’s salary have been nothing but lies. I’ve been reading this strip for two and a half years and I haven’t witnessed anything from him that might qualify as a billable hour.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/25/07

Well, well, well, it looks like “the nanny” had what it took to be a heartless, Machiavellian corporate schemer all along! Just seconds after humiliating her stepson in front of the motley cast of characters on Avery International’s board, with a single regal wave of her hand she puts the smack down on Peter the Perhaps Too Helpful Chauffeur, who was probably thinking that he’d soon find himself Peter the General Counsel or Peter the CFO for his pains. The only remaining obstacle left in the path of her total triumph would be the poor missing Milton Avery himself, and I think that perhaps that search and rescue effort might find itself called off even after the weather improves — we don’t want to be a burden on the British taxpayer, you see, not with the National Health being in such a poor state. If the plane itself is never found, of course, then nobody will be the wiser about certain … modifications to its engines that were implemented just before its final, fatal flight.

I wouldn’t have been implying any of this before today, but then I saw the third panel here, in which Heather gives us a look that will hollow out a person’s soul with an ice-cream scoop.

Blondie, 5/25/07

This, combined with this, makes me think that the the creators of Blondie no longer believe children to be the future, but rather to be the terrifying, menacing present. Look for Dagwood to lead the charge for all children under the age of 12 to placed in prison camps, and only be released when they’ve passed a series of tests of their moral rectitude. Dag’s suck-up buddy Elmo will be a camp guard, of course.

Mary Worth, 5/25/07

I haven’t really been talking about Mary Worth much because oh God oh God SO BORING. Mary urges Vera to open her heart and forgive her brother, Vera deigns to read letter from Von, letter rambles on at great length, blah blah blabbity blah. I think today’s installment is kind of hilarious, though, because it gets to the heart of Vera’s beef against her brother: she’s not mad because he broke the bonds of filial friendship, or because he let his anger get the best of him over a trivial matter, or because he exploited their father’s sexism for financial gain; no, she’s angry because his actions forced her to get a job, which is presumably one of the most loathsome acts of degradation that she could have possibly been compelled to endure. I dearly hope that she shows up at Creepy Lack Of Affect Advertising Agency and tells all of her former coworkers that she thinks they’re low-class plebes whose only role in this world is to buoy the stock market so that she and her brother can live in unimaginable luxury, only to return to stately Von and Vera Manor to discover that Von has exhausted their savings to buy expensive hooch with which to cool his fevered brow.

IMPORTANT MARK TRAIL-RELATED UPDATE: They won’t stop with birds, people!