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Spider-Man, 4/27/12

Here is me getting you up to speed on the current Spider-Man plot: Peter went with MJ to a cast meeting for her play, and her co-star showed up on crutches, and said he had a freak accident in which he fell down the stairs (“almost felt like someone pushed me!”). I half-expected Peter to be enlisted to replace him, but then the stuff you see above happened, which makes almost as little sense. Don’t Broadway productions as a rule have understudies for the major roles? Can anyone just wander in off the street and secure a part in a stage play if they’re desperate enough? Is MJ’s play actually a comedy? Would anyone with even a slight sense of what might make someone a bankable comedic actor use the name “Hardy Laurel”? Are we expected to be surprised when it turns out that Hardy Laurel is the guy who pushed MJ’s co-star down the stairs, using some kind of boring superpower, and that Spider-Man will have to defeat him in a half-assed fashion?

Mark Trail, 4/27/12

Honestly, you can’t blame those “drug guys” for their violent anger at Ranger Tom. I mean, if you had spent a hot afternoon harvesting marijuana with a pirate cutlass and some fat-cat government bureaucrat who had been sitting on his ass all day started whining about being thirsty, you’d want him to shut up too.

Mary Worth, 4/27/12

I’m sure as a cabbie you get inured to the inane conversational stylings of your passengers, but I do find Mary’s choices here kind of puzzling. This “special announcement” is frankly the most interesting thing you’ve got in this anecdote, Mary! Why are you holding it in thought-balloon reserve?

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Funky Winkerbean, 4/17/12

So this perky underclassman nerd is attempting to woo jock senior Summer by means of anonymous text messages, which sounds like something that most girls would find spectacularly creepy and would probably earn him a punch in the face, but in the Funkyverse there’s a 50-50 chance this will result in true love. It did make me wonder (a) if anonymous text messages are even something you can send from your phone, (b) if so how a reply could get back to you, and (c) assuming such things exist, if anyone really calls them “restricted texts” as our amorous dweeb has been doing. Then I realized that I had just a little too much self respect to put the energy into researching the answers to these questions, so I didn’t! Aren’t you proud of me?

Mark Trail, 4/17/12

By “updating an aerial survey of his area,” Doc of course means “masturbating.” He knows that Mark will go in search of Tom, and hopes that, in stumbling upon him in the act of onanism, Mark will finally be forced to confront the reality of human sexuality. Decades of marriage to Doc’s daughter hasn’t done the trick, so this may be his last chance.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/17/12

So far, this plot’s central mystery has revolved around the dead Foster’s true character. Was he a lovable old rogue who perhaps drank a bit more than he should? Or was he a hateful alcoholic dick? The fact that he left for his daughter a book (one that everyone keeps emphasizing “reads like a screenplay”) that’s full of traumatizingly hot sex scenes involving her mother seems to tip things towards the latter possibility.

Spider-Man, 4/17/12

The last bit of dramatic tension in this storyline has been resolved without any help whatsoever from our ostensible protagonist, so now he can finally celebrate Spidey-style! Spidey-style celebration apparently consists of a little jig that’s frankly embarrassing to watch, because dancing is one of the many, many things Spider-Man sucks at.

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B.C., 4/13/12

Hey, let’s talk about jokes, shall we? Let’s say you want to write a joke about about a rabbit who likes hip-hop music. I know, pretty funny, right? Because rabbits hop about? I mean, you know, the Preakness, a legitimate million-dollar horse race with a storied history, couldn’t resist making a rapping pirate Easter Bunny one of their mascots, so really, how could we expect B.C. to resist?

BUT HERE’S THE THING ABOUT JOKES, which is that you need some kind of set up, right? Like, here your set up is “all the animals are telling their favorite kind of music, and we want to the interrogator to be irritated by the cute puns by the time he gets to the hip-hop liking rabbit.” Except! The snake likes grunge music and the turtle likes easy listening, which, unless I am woefully out of the loop about animal stereotypes, have nothing to do with their species. They’re just … arbitrary musical genres. Here’s what the bird-thing should say in the final panel: “Oh, please, say hip-hop! I want the world to make some sort of sense, if only for a moment!”

Baldo, 4/13/12

Aw, Baldo is having a hard time working up the nerve to talk to a girl he likes, so his friend Cruz has brought him a Halloween prop to practice with! I don’t really talk about Baldo very much here, but I do read it every day, and when important things happen, like the title character being encouraged to hump a sex doll dressed as a witch, I feel obliged to bring them to your attention.

Spider-Man, 4/13/12

Well, Spidey, it looks like MJ just woke up without any help from you! “She’s just … someone I rescued — that’s all,” he says. “Yeah, rescued, that’s it.”