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Mark Trail, 12/13/09

The hilarious “Rusty in peril” plot dominating the weekday strips prove that Mark Trail has changed its core mission from “wildlife education” to “gleeful sadism.” Today’s installment offers further evidence, as Mark finally seems to acknowledge that Cherry needs to love, and to be loved, before abandoning her to have fun party times with Andy the dog. Much of the rest of the imagery in the strip is allegorical, with the ludicrously sad-eyed puppy in the middle bottom panel representing Cherry’s emotional devastation, and the terrifying devil-cat in the first panel representing her ever-growing rage.

The rightmost panel in the middle row, meanwhile, offers a unique in-fireplace perspective, and presumably stands in for the eternal punishment that awaits any wanna-be Santas who would give an unwanted animal as gift. Mark and Andy will be right there to watch you cast into the hellfire, animal abuser!

Blondie, 12/13/09

This may be the most unsettling Blondie yet produced. Those who don’t get to see the throwaway panels are missing the full effect, as Dithers creepily demands that Dagwood close his eyes as he approaches with his sinister doll — presumably so the tiny monster’s little face is the first thing he sees when he opens them again, and he can be more easily hypnotized. Dagwood’s stunned silence in the antepenultimate and penultimate panels are the behavior you’d expect from someone given an evil little homunculus, but the fact that he’s brought it home is evidence that he’s under its power. Soon it will tell him to kill.

Slylock Fox, 12/13/09

Also, Slylock and Max have been lurking outside that window for hours, watching Cassandra walking around in her little bathrobe, so if anything like that happened they would have noticed.

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Spider-Man, 11/20/09

It really shouldn’t come as surprise to anyone that the quality control over at the newspaper Spider-Man strip is less than stringent; but, as several faithful readers have written to me to point out, the feature appears to be reaching for stunning new levels of “Eh, why bother?” It seems that at some point this plotline’s pathetic villain has had his name switched from Bigshot to Bigtime. This is obviously troubling, not least because there was already a newspaper Spider-Man villain named Bigtime just last year. Worse, while Bigtime — who earned that moniker when his all-pervasive clock fetish matched up with his given name of Bigelow — seemed like a pretty lame nemesis for a superhero at the time, he’s like the love child of Catwoman and Lex Luthor when compared to Bigshot, who got his name because he’s short. It’s a sad day when your villainy suffers in comparison to someone whose crimes were entirely timepiece-themed.

Dick Tracy, 11/20/09

So this is something like the fourth separate and contradictory explanation that’s been offered for the events of this Dick Tracy plot — which explanations, I should add, have taken up more strip time than the events they are attempting to explain. This one makes even less sense than the others. In my experience, circuses tend to travel from place to place, and thus there’s no “property” to purchase, unless we’re talking about the actual tent itself, for which I’m guessing there isn’t a huge resale market. Cyber the tiger looks as enraged by this as anyone about all this, and I sincerely hope he (or she?) finally just eats everyone to shut them up.

Judge Parker, 11/20/09

I just had this bit of realization about this plot: Sam Driver is withholding information from the police about this note, and knowledge about this note could set his client free — his client who has terminal cancer and not long to live. Presumably he thinks it would be much more dramatic to reveal his ace card during the trial (“discovery”? what’s that?) in stunning and dramatic fashion than it would be to work the whole thing out now and let his client spend the last few weeks of his life with his family. In other words, Sam, never one to rest on his laurels, is working hard to secure the title of Dickiest Man Alive.

Ziggy, 11/20/09

I’ve always been disturbed by the fact that nightmarish gore-fests like Hostel or the Saw movies get R ratings while sexy flicks like Henry and June or The Dreamers get NC-17s, and now I have another reason to feel that way: this horoscope implies that Ziggy will not be violently murdered, but will rather participate in some no doubt queasy-making sex act.

Slylock Fox, 11/20/09

The final step when drawing a member of the proletariat: the honest grime of manual labor!

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Slylock Fox, 11/15/09

Something seems seriously askew about the justice system in the world of Slylock Fox. Count Weirdly is the defendant in an elaborate trial with no fewer than five witnesses against him, yet we all know from experience that no matter what the verdict, he’ll be back in his critter-filled lair, plotting deranged, pointless evil, in only a few weeks’ time. It has to really make a lawfox like Slylock question the importance of his vocation, as he busies himself arranging the order in which his witnesses will testify in a needlessly complex fashion.

Meanwhile, in the Six Differences, our pastoral painter is about to learn about the drawbacks of photorealism the hard way, as a befuddled pooch, unable to differentiate between the representation and the represented, urinates all over his artwork.

Hagar the Horrible, 11/15/09

Yes, this bachelor rarely enjoys a home-cooked meal! He generally eats out, or eats a meal that he, uh, cooks at home. Oh, wait, I get it, “home-cooked” is code word for “cooked by a vagina-bearing individual!”

Panel from Blondie, 11/15/09

I found this panel strangely touching. While Dithers generally subjects Dagwood to nothing but persecution and abuse, when he finally admits to himself that his mind is going, he realizes that he’s driven away all intimate companionship with his bluster, and that Dagwood is the closest thing he has to a friend. However, subsequent panels completely fail to follow up on the notion of Dithers gradually going insane, and thus I quickly lost interest.

Panel from Crock, 11/15/09

Meanwhile, because the bottom half of the telephone handset depicted here seems to have vanished, when I first saw this panel I thought for a moment that Crock had decided to put a gun to his head and end both his life and the strip named after him. IF ONLY.