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Marvin, 6/23/24
Not to brag or anything, but after nearly 20 years of my doing this blog, my archives page has become a valuable historical resource that anyone can use to explore the history of newspaper comic strips in the 21st century, assuming that the strip you’re looking for was something I thought was interesting or particularly bad or that I could turn into a weird riff on whatever day it was published. I myself cannot keep all this history in my head and frequently turn to the archives for answers to questions like “Have we ever actually seen Marvin’s aunt in the strip before?” It turns out that in 2006 there was a plotline involving his aunt adopting a baby from China named “Ming Ming” whose appearance is extremely off-putting because she looks exactly like a Funko Pop, something I wasn’t able to articulate at the time because, as I discovered after a little research, Funko Pops would not be invented for another five years. I am a wizened old man and I hope that you, my faithful readers, are preparing yourselves to be mummified and entombed with me in the spectacular pyramid of comics jokes I’ve been building over the past two decades.
Wait, where was I? Oh, right, what I’m saying is that I assume the Marvin creative team long ago forgot about poor Ming Ming, just like I had, and presumably they don’t use my archives page for research because they don’t want to read all the mean things I say about their work. It’s not even clear to me that this is supposed to be the same aunt, or if we can even say that there’s a fixed set of Marvin’s relatives that have continuously existed in some sense over the past 20 years. I also don’t know if being part of the neo-rockabilly lifestyle is an established bit of lore about Marvin’s dad’s terrible coworker. I could go back into my archives to find out but, you know what? I’ve already spent enough time digging through the depths of Marvin for one day. Gotta limit my exposure, for my own good.
Shoe, 6/23/24
For reasons unclear to me, Shoe recently decided to bring back Muffy Hollandaise, the Treetops Tattler’s former intern, who stopped appearing in the strip so long ago that my archives would be of no help in learning her secrets. I say the reasons are unclear to me because they reintroduced her as an avowed enemy of her former boss and a successful journalist in an industry that is, if not thriving, then at least doing better than print media; but, despite that set-up, she’s mostly being used like every other character in the strip, which is to say she delivers cruel, wordplay-adjacent zingers. I do have to say that I enjoy the way she leans in to deliver her line here. Lets you know there’s real venom in it.
