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Mary Worth, 8/28/12

You know, there’s nothing like leaving town and not reading the comics for a week and then coming home and reading the comics to really put into focus how little happens in the average week of, say, Mary Worth. As I left, Wilbur and Dawn where being heli-lifted to safety from their terrible cruise wreck ordeal, and in the interim … Ian angrily watched a news report about the crisis, and Wilbur and Dawn re-enacted it with hand puppetry over dinner with Mary, and that was it!

But now I have come to believe that Mary Worth was holding off on its big guns just for me, waiting until I came home to serve up this, because yes, when we talk about Mary Worth and “big guns” obviously we are talking about Wilbur making jazz hands and burbling merrily about how he is a living, breathing refutation of Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest. “Life is brutal,” Wilbur will tell those residents of the Santa Royale micropolitan area who get their news from the dying print media, “and yet I, Wilbur Weston, still breathe air and eat mayonnaise, while so many stronger and smarter and less sweaty souls drowned in terror in the balmy, calm Mediterranean waters. I stand before you as proof that there is no justice in the universe, alive through no virtue of my own. You cannot kill the ultimate mediocrity, my friends! I am unstoppable.”

Apartment 3-G, 8/28/12

Meanwhile, in Apartment 3-G, Margo the publicist has managed to land a client who literally refuses to tell her what he’s doing that she might publicize. It’s OK, though, because he’s a hot piece of ass (or at least we assume that a shapely bum lurks forever just below the bottom of the panel) who is also conceited and arrogant. What would be the fastest way to convince him that Margo would be a suitable sex partner? Would seeing her imperiously dress down a subordinate do the trick? Done and done! Added bonus: this episode also serves as part of Margo and Evan’s dom-sub play. Girlfriend is nothing if not efficient!

Blondie, 8/28/12

All right, let’s ignore Alexander’s woefully sexist views of how polyamory should work and instead focus on the real important story here — namely, the insane layout of the furniture in the Bumstead living room. I’ve commented on it before, but it’s only now occurred to me that it can be explained fairly easily as just Dagwood’s attempt to keep any of his family members from trying to interact with him while he watches TV. Usually, as we saw just yesterday, there’s a sofa turned away from Dag’s sittin’ chair, so that he can maintain the illusion of spending quality time with his loved ones without actually having to look at their stupid faces. But as we saw, even then people expect to talk to him and have him respond to their word-noises, and so now he’s gotten rid of the couch altogether, leaving Alexander nothing to sit on but the ottoman. His icy silence as his son blabs about his relationship problems says volumes.

Spider-Man, 8/28/12

“It’s almost as if he wanted to gather a large group of people together so that he could threaten them with violence and rob them, as he’s done in the past! Anyway, this should be quite a spectacle, I’m glad we came.”

Momma, 8/28/12

Momma may have come down some in the world, but she certainly isn’t about to engage in any tawdry sex-for-lamp-discounts schemes.

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Momma, 8/17/12

If you’re wondering why Francis would scurry away from the beach in terror after just looking at a nagging sign his mother made, despite the fact that she isn’t even present to enforce her insane edict … take a look at the handwriting on the sign, which Francis easily identifies as his mother’s. Now take a look at the handwriting in his thought balloon. Does it look … familiar? Can you imagine the horror of having Momma’s voice in your head, every time you think? Leaving you always wondering whether your thoughts are even yours at all? This whole beach situation is quite frankly the least of Francis’s problems right now.

Spider-Man, 8/17/12

Just to briefly catch you up on the exciting newspaper Spider-Man action: Spidey was trying to figure out where he could find Clown-9 so they could have a showdown, then he saw an ad in the paper for a circus, and he said, basically, “A circus! Clowns love circuses! He’ll be there!” This seemed like not the most air-tight sequence of reasoning, which even Spider-Man has figured out, because now he’s just going on TV to tell Clown-9 when and where to show up so the two of them can engage in violent, deadly combat. Some might think that he could have chosen any arbitrary spot as the site for their battle. “I’ve a message for Clown-9! I challenge you to a showdown tomorrow night at the old abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of town!” But no, best to do it a the circus, where hundreds of innocent people, including many children, will be gathered to watch. Good planning, super-hero!

Six Chix, 8/17/12

Hey, at least bug-eyed crawling-on-the-floor lady admits that something’s wrong with her, horribly-stooped-over seriously-are-you-a-hunchback lady!

Judge Parker, 8/17/12

As we’ve seen, Avery’s negotiating strategy involves agreeing to everyone’s demands immediately and giving them as much money as possible, so yes, I’m willing to believe that people rarely say no to him.

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Judge Parker, 8/5/12

The first time I saw Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, it was at the tail end of a big Hitchock binge, and so one of the things I found most striking about it was that it was about half of a typical Hitchcock movie. Which is to say: As in most of his movies, we get a cast of quirky character trading snappy dialogue, and start to get a sense of dysfunction underlying their interpersonal dynamics. Usually, the story’s excitement would emerge from these relationships fairly early in the movie; but in The Birds, whatever plot you think is brewing is suddenly and violently pushed aside by an incomprehensible apocalypse, as (uh, spoilers, I guess) every bird in the world suddenly goes insane and starts attacking humanity. It’s well and truly shocking in particular if you’re a Hitchcock fan, because you watch one of his meticulously constructed universes suddenly shatter under assault from an external force that is never explained.

This is a long way of me saying that, if the current round of enjoyable but predictable Judge Parker antics were abruptly interrupted by a terrifying and bloody raccoon revolution, I for one would be fully in favor of such a development.

Mary Worth, 8/5/12

Guys, sorry I left you hanging on the Mary Worth boat-plot — metaphorically, I mean, not literally hanging off the side of a listing cruise boat, like these guys. Anyway, Wilbur didn’t fall to his death and it looks like our gang will be rescued by a helicopter instead? Which, call me a swimming-snob if you must, but is it really easier to pluck half a dozen terrified passengers from the tilted deck of a rapidly sinking ship than it is for those passengers to, say, swim the length of two swimming pools through warm coastal non-oceanic water to safety? Tell me I’m crazy! Am I crazy?

Rex Morgan, 8/5/12

I’ll probably get sick of “Rex Morgan smiles to himself while taking flack from sassy old people” plotlines at some point, but for now, I say bring ’em on! “Tell me something I don’t know!” Rex says to Melissa, trying to figure out how to get into the space suddenly left open in her will by her ungrateful niece.

Spider-Man, 8/5/12

As if you couldn’t tell from the entire run of Newspaper Spider-Man to this point, spider-sense can not predict or protect against public humiliation.