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Pluggers, 3/17/10

While I’m not anything close to a coffee fiend, I do speak idiomatic English, and I’m reasonably sure that nobody uses “grind” as a noun to refer to coffee in this way. It actually sounds more like street lingo for some mind-altering drug, possibly one made by grinding up the various prescription medications pluggers inevitably have on hand and then pouring them into a coffee machine.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/17/10

I’m a little bit sad that Toots has pegged Sarah as a squealer. He ought to know, based on his own encounter with the terrifying moppet, that she is as hard as nails and almost certainly subscribes to a “snitches get stitches” philosophy; indeed, he will presumably soon have reasons to regret his own inability to keep his mouth shut.

In the final panel, we see that the Rex Morgan team is attempting to jump on the morose sandwich eating bandwagon that’s been so lucrative for Mary Worth.

Ziggy, 3/17/10

Ha ha, Ziggy’s been programmed by the Reds as some kind of brainwashed assassin! Fortunately, he’ll fail miserably at that like he does in everything else in life, and then we’ll laugh and laugh.

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Mary Worth, 1/11/10

You’d think that after, what, five and a half years of analyzing this nonsense “professionally,” my capacity to be amused and delighted by the total inability of Mary Worth characters to speak the way that the humans do would have slowly been dulled. But you would be mistaken, as nothing in today’s comics got as big a laugh out of me as “I suffer from an uneasy restlessness” did. It might actually seem here that scruffy neo-hobo Kurt is going to offer a radical alternative to this strip’s suffocating bourgeois values, and will lure Wilbur away from his comfortable condo life towards a new less stable and more vital existence, traveling from town to town to see what experiences the world has in store. But Kurt came into Wilbur’s life via the Internet, and everything associated with the Internet in Mary Worth is bad, so clearly this storyline will end with that sort of disaster averted and Wilbur returned safely to his ordinary soul-numbing life.

More proof that Kurt and Wilbur may actually be related by blood: their shared impulse to wear jackets and hats of precisely the same hue.

Jumble, 1/11/10

Speaking of suffocating bourgeois values, there’s something quite poignant about today’s Jumble, in which a group of crazed shoppers respond to a half-off sale on sodium-laden processed semi-food with a level of frenzy usually reserved for the Beatles circa 1964. I’m particularly saddened by the dude in the background, who’s cheerfully running over to the freezer case to make sure that he can bring home as many trays of microwaveable goop as possible, unaware of his life’s essential emptiness.

Crock, 1/11/10

I have many gripes against the creative team behind Crock, but one particular unlikable aspect of the strip as I encounter it is beyond their control: the fact that the desert setting is routinely slathered with a neon yellow unlike any found in nature must be blamed on the post-production colorists, not the credited artists. Still, it’s distracting, as in today’s strip, where it appears that Kerwood is being worked to death in some kind of sand mine.

Marvin, 1/11/10

For decades scientists have wondered: Would it be possible to create a character less appealing than Marvin? Well, the creators of this long running crime against humanity strip have decided to take that challenge head-on, by creating a Tyler Durden-style alternate personality for the titular hell-infant that encapsulates all of his worst qualities. The horrible little pig-faced monster is wearing his hat backwards for no good reason, which I suppose is a start.

Ziggy, 1/11/10

Thanks to a challenge from Stephan Pastis, Ziggy briefly experimented late last year with putting pants on its title character. That experiment has now thankfully been abandoned, but today we can see why Ziggy usually eschews trousers, as even a few weeks of wearing them has horribly mangled his legs. Are his feet pointing backwards?

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Well, kids, as happens every year, I’m about to depart for my annual multi-city Christmas travelganza. I will start posting again on January 2, or thereabouts! But, as has become my wont, I have some fun things to share with you before I sign off for the year.

First up is an awesomely ambitious offering from faithful reader commodorejohn! You may have heard some of this comics-themed music before; now he’s completed an entire concept album called The Funnies, the cover art to which I dearly hope he doesn’t mind that I reproduce here:

With song titles like “Mary Worth Told Me To,” “Bösendorfer Bop,” and “Rockin’ The Armory (Recorded live at the Bucket, August 4th, 2009.)”, how could you go wrong? And it’s downloadable for free! What are you waiting for?

Also! I got a note from faithful reader Kattack about a recent trip she took to Monterey, California, where she encountered a playground dedicated to Dennis the Menace. Here she is, high-fiving and frolicking with the cartoon scamp in an extremely non-menacing fashion:

As is generally the case, the missing menace was provided by raccoons, who have decided to blanket the park with their delicious-looking feces:

“I actually made my whole family go out of their way to find this park once I saw it on a map because I knew you would appreciate it,” Kattack says. “The raccoon shit sign was just a bonus.”

Also! We’ve all been watching in mingled horror and fascination as the Pearls Before Swine characters have, with apparent success, agitated for Ziggy to start wearing pants. But what if things had gone … the other way? The Jumble’s Jeff Knurek dares to visualize it!

And finally! Faithful reader Susan sent me some pics of one of her delightful finds: a Mark Trail coloring book!

Wait, who’s this little blonde girl? A friend for Rusty? Ha ha, just kidding, it’s well known that Rusty has no friends.

What says “good, wholesome fun for kids” more than the severed heads of their favorite comics characters surrounding a personal message from Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior?

The most unsettling thing to me about this image is Mark and Rusty’s white hair. Kids, do you have an extremely black crayon? One that’s blacker than black? One that’s so black it appears to shine with its own dark, mysterious inner light?

Let me just step in here and say that you don’t own any of America, Rusty. It’s exactly this sort of commie “holding land in common” talk that led directly to Mark’s brutal assault on a duly appointed law enforcement officer.

And on that note, I leave you to your own holiday fun. See ya in 2010, everybody!