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Marvin, 3/18/16

Sure, we make fun of Marvin for the poop jokes a lot around here, but definitely worse than the poop jokes are the jokes about how Marvin and his fellow babies have romantic lives. At least pooping is a normal and healthy thing babies really do! Gross, but normal and healthy! This week’s storyline has involved a weird inverse evil Cyrano de Bergerac scenario where Marvin’s “girlfriend” (ugh) wants to watch musicals with him, and Marvin doesn’t enjoy them and can’t bring himself to perform even this incredibly basic bit of emotional labor, so he’s brought in some kind of lookalike ringer to take his place. But it turns out that if someone does all the work of a relationship on Marvin’s behalf, Marvin isn’t necessary … at all? This is definitely the worst thing you’ll read in the comics today, and will make you glad next week when all the jokes are about Marvin stewing in his own feces.

Judge Parker, 3/18/16

Sure, we make fun of Judge Parker for always having every story end with someone handing the protagonists money, but definitely worse than someone handing the protagonists money is someone literally abusing their position of state-sanctioned power to help the protagonists, because they’re good and/or rich and thus deserve to have the law bent on their behalf. Like, remember when Rocky Ledge assaulted a photographer, then felt bad about it, and Sam had the local constabulary run the guy out of town? (The guy who had been beaten up, not the guy who had done the beating.) Anyway, definitely a good use of some highway patrolman’s time and tax-funded paycheck will be driving around looking for a rental car and then informing some random private citizen about said rental car’s location. But why stop there, really? Why not just send a special ops team to “extract” Rocky from his romantic getaway with his secretary, eliminating any potential witnesses to his infidelity in the process?

Pluggers, 3/18/16

You know you’re a plugger when you choose to live someplace so unrelentingly hostile to pedestrians that, to stave off that coronary for another month or two via the sort of “exercise” that used to be a basic reality of the human condition, you have to drive your polluting automobile onto a vast expanse of asphalt so you can walk dully in circles through a gently decaying indoor mall.

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Mary Worth, 3/17/16

What do you think the story is with that all-blue-clad guy in panel two? How irritated do you think he is that his nighttime (?) reverie and his plan to stare at the ocean and the setting (??) moon (???) for hours have been interrupted by Mary and Jeff drunkenly stumbling up the boardwalk shouting at each other about how great Mary is at fixing people’s problems? Do you think he know how much those pants flatter his ass? (Based on the pose he’s striking, I’m guessing yes.)

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/17/16

Haha, whoops, it seems noted local pinhead Franco Wallace is only bad-mouthing his ex’s house so that she can’t sell it, because if she sells it, she’ll move away and he’ll never see her again! Rex’s facial expression in panel three gives you a pretty good sense of what he thinks of human beings and their so-called “emotions.”

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Mark Trail, 3/16/16

Only in Mark Trail could the hunky protagonist get away with urging the shapely female guest star, already standing unnaturally so as to emphasize her bosom and posterior, to crawl away from him so he could get a good look. Anyone else would be transparently exploiting an extremely dangerous scenario to sexually humiliate a poor woman, but we all know that Mark has never thought about sex in his life. His advice must be entirely practical here. Don’t worry, Carina, you’re in safe hands. Safe and entirely unerotic hands.

Dick Tracy, 3/16/16

Again, not really engaging much with this storyline, but wanted to point out that Dick’s new detective pals work for authoritarian regimes and are very impressed by US surveillance technology.

Family Circus, 3/16/16

Alright, who had “7” in the “how early would Billy peak, intellectually” pool?