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Mark Trail, 8/4/07

Who says Mark Trail isn’t good at depicting human beings? In most hugs I’ve participated in, Person A throws his or her arms completely around Person B, tightly pinning Person B’s arms to his or her torso while he or she stands there, ramrod-straight, grinning somewhat uncomfortably. It’s a joy to behold such human closeness!

Shoe, 8/4/07

Shoe takes a break from its recent obsession with death and regret and death to offer something a little lighter: old drunks with diarrhea.

Pluggers, 8/4/07

Pluggers are desperate substance addicts. If they haven’t had their junk, they’re angry and prone to ugly bouts of violence.

Speaking of Pluggers, faithful reader (and actual math professor) TurtleBoy did some epic number crunching to try to distill out some useful facts on the demographics of Pluggers and TDIET contributors. Will it be enough to get him tenure? Check it out!

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Apartment 3-G, 7/29/07

For shame, Margo Magee! I seem to remember that a certain young brunette was very pleased to received all sorts of aesthetically unsettling knickknacks from total strangers celebrating her liberation from white slavery. So don’t begrudge the brain-damaged girl her moment in the sun, OK?

Unless Eric’s note features magical talking handwriting, Tommie doesn’t know what it is that has Margo so excited, but we can all still join her in a hearty “Where?!” Eric said “dinner at my place tomorrow night”, Margo. Either she’s planning on spending a full 24 hours primping for their reunion, or she’s going to burst into his apartment early and catch him in the arms of his sister-in-law. Either way, it’ll make for four to six weeks of good fun.

Shoe, 7/29/07

I’m really starting to worry about Shoe. As I’ve noted, the strip suddenly seems fixated on wasted lives and impending death. Today, as if five consecutive panels of a sobbing, emotionally distraught Perfesser weren’t enough, in the first panel we actually get to see Gilmore the Goldfish’s last moment on earth, his heavy-lidded eyes solemn with the sudden realization that for him, the veil separating this world from the next was about to part and he would forever transcend to the beyond. Then, for good measure, we’re shown his corpse. Bizarrely, the whole thing is capped off with a nonsensical joke. It’s as if Roz is telling us that the only way we can escape the crushing pain that comes with the knowledge of our own mortality is by taking refuge in the deliberate nonsense of Dada.

Funky Winkerbean, 7/29/07

The Moment We’ve All Been Waiting For is here, more or less, though surely Darrin will spend weeks moping aimlessly with the knowledge that his birth mother is dying of cancer before he actually works up the nerve to talk to her. I mostly wanted to point out his look of stunned horror as his face looms above the “BEAN” in Winkerbean in the first panel. It really nicely encapsulates the mood of the strip, though it does leave us wondering about his mouth — a perfect O of shock, or a grimace of emotional distress?

Finally, today’s Mary Worth is too horrible for me to contemplate, but I did want to share this pic from faithful reader Dan, who offers it as proof that tiny, tiny horses like the ones Drew and Dawn are riding do exist — in Mongolia!

This frankly opens up a number of wonderful possibilities. Are Drew and Dawn training in the art of nomad horsemanship? Will they join a fearsome horde of warriors, swooping down upon the settled folk, burning their homes, stealing their gold, and leaving piles of bones in their wake? Will Charterstone be their first target? Please?

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Gil Thorp, 7/24/07

My mom is retiring in the fall after thirty years as a teacher, and I have to imagine that, if one of her erstwhile students had shown up on a hot day in July and said, “Hey, remember me, the kid who accidentally chopped off his own leg with a chainsaw last fall? Could I hang around the school this summer and maybe you can teach me stuff? My dad will buy you supplies!”, her reaction would be — well, not rude, since she’s not a rude person, but firm, and negative. In fact, she didn’t spend her summers hanging around the school at all, possibly to avoid just such an awkward confrontation, though more likely because she has a life, unlike Gil Thorp, apparently.

I’m pleased to see that Coach Kaz has chosen to take time out from his exciting summer to brave the horrifying stench that lingers in Milford High’s gym and hang out with this cavalcade of losers. Mostly I’m hoping that he’s going to teach Bill Ritter that if you believe in yourself enough, you can punch a dude right in the hypothalamus no matter how many legs you have. But Coach Thorp is lucky to have someone else around right now, too, because he’s obviously rapidly deflating. In panel two, he and Coach Kaz both look like ’roided out He-Man extras, threatening to burst right out of those cotton t-shirts with their manly chesteses. But in panel three, slouchy, scrawny Gil looks more like the guy from the famous Charles Atlas sand-kicked-in-his-face ads before dynamic tension worked its magic. Even his flattop is kind of droopy.

Mary Worth, 7/24/07

Good God, what kind of world do we live in where the action in Gil Thorp stays with the same two characters in the same room for three consecutive panels, while the Mary Worth chronology leaps forward “several weeks” willy-nilly? I suppose we’re going to find out that Dawn has been sneaking off to the horse stables to “ride” with Drew for the past few weeks under the pretext of studying. Since it makes absolutely no sense to conceal this fact from her father, we’re just going to have to accept that “horseback riding” in Mary Worth should always be understood to mean “illicit sex.”

Shoe, 7/24/07

Do you ever get the feeling that a cartoon is drawn by someone who’s working off of a script and who almost, but not quite, speaks English? Our random brunette says “I love mysteries!”, but with the little hearts floating over her head and the way she flings her body halfway up the counter, it seems more like she should be saying “I love your hot body!” or “I love crystal meth!” Because this is Shoe, the Perfesser manages to kill this puzzling but genuine enthusiasm with a terrible joke.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 7/24/07

As a work-at-home type, I can tell you that this is a pitfall of the home office lifestyle. That’s why I refuse to answer the phone or the doorbell, and frequently insist that my wife lie about my whereabouts as I labor feverishly in my office with the door barricaded. What puzzles me about the scenario depicted here, though, is the presence of two adult women in the Ragweed household. Is this some weird amalgamation of the modern world of the home office and the TDIET 1950s sensibility, where every male white-collar worker has a female secretary? Or is Ragweed a polygamist as well a freelancer?