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Comment of the Week

My little friend is not so little anymore, Toby! In fact, she's quite large! Enormous, in fact! Nine foot six and getting taller by the day! It's actually quite alarming! We're getting into I'm a Virgo territory here! Did you watch that miniseries, by the way? It was on Amazon Prime a couple of years ago! Jharrel Jerome is a treasure! Some great performances by Elijah Wood and Walton Goggins as well, which reminds me that I need to start my Justified rewatch. Oh, Margo Martindale is another treasure, especially as a voice in BoJack Horseman. Anyway, Olive is a giant, is the point I'm trying to make.

—els
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“Friend” is what John calls all the children Mary brings him to bake into pies

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Mary Worth, 1/19/16

Oh, look, it’s another Beloved Character From Mary Worth’s Past, which gives me another chance to walk you down memory lane, building up my pageviews in the process! You might remember John Dill as a former Charterstone resident who appeared at a pool party just after his wife’s death with a garish cake. Turns out he’d always dreamed of being a professional cake designer, and decided to risk ridicule by entering Santa Royale’s notoriously tough cake design contest — and Mary volunteered to help. Dr. Jeff was briefly jealous, but Mary assured him that she and John had a strictly professional relationship [FORESHADOWING]. After a grueling cake-design montage, Team John Dill was ready to go! On camera, John reacted to the assigned decorating theme — “the beauty of nature” — by carving an idol of Mary as a pagan fertility goddess, proving that Dr. Jeff was entirely correct to be suspicious of John’s intentions (keeping in mind that John’s wife was barely cold in the ground at this point). John and Mary won, obviously, and didn’t just get a big check but also an opportunity to apprentice with New York’s very own Chef Pierre! John wanted Mary to go to New York with him to learn how to make cakes and also probably do sex stuff, but she turned him down, so he flew off thinking sad thoughts. Later, Mary visited New York and seriously considered leaving Dr. Jeff for handsome Broadway actor Ken Kensington and visited John not at all, but now she’s stuck trying to entertain Olive for days on end, so, sure, she’ll drop by and see how he’s doing in year three of his unpaid internship.

Mark Trail, 1/19/16

Oh, whoops, Gabe isn’t angling to get Mark to write an article about his damn bats at all. He’s angling to get Mark into a three-way with him, like he’d always wanted. Considering the economics of the print magazine industry, this actually makes more sense.

Herb and Jamaal, 1/19/16

Good lord, are computers really just flat, featureless 8-inch squares now? This punchline really resonates with me!

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Death of print Monday

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Shoe, 1/18/16

Last week I was on the I Haven’t Seen That podcast, a very funny and exciting podcast hosted by Whitney Reynolds and Mark Popham, and we talked newspaper comics, among other things, and it was interesting to see what people do and don’t pick up from the comics. For instance, Mark claimed that, despite reading Shoe regularly, he never realized that its damned bird-men characters work at a newspaper! But they do, and that newspaper apparently runs restaurant reviews, which is curious because the only places where we ever see the bird-people eating out are Roz’s, the sad ’70s fern bar, and I think maybe a fancy white-cloth restaurant with a snooty French waiter? Anyway, there’s three of them, tops, so I assume that each one is reviewed about once a month or so, which the Perfesser’s look of crushing ennui confirms. “Ugggh, what to write about Roz’s this time … old people? Old drunk people? A review for old drunk people? Sounds about right.”

Mary Worth, 1/18/16

You’d think a “professional bakery kitchen” would sound pretty dull even to a known square like Olive, but the alternative seems to be putting together a completely white jigsaw puzzle with Mary while enjoying cookies and water, so you can see why she’s jumping at the opportunity.

Heathcliff, 1/18/16

This is a joke about how Heathcliff and his girlfriend are going to engage in some pharmaceutically-enhanced fucking right here on this couple’s lawn! They brought props, to taunt them with! Let’s hear it for Heathcliff, and for newspaper features editors who just don’t care anymore!

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Mostly panels Sunday

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Panels from Mark Trail, 1/17/16

Wow, it sounds like these so-called fishermen are making a ton of money from animals that aren’t even fish! What a bunch of frauds! Sure glad Mark Trail is on the case to blow the lid off of these seafaring phonies.

Spider-Man, 1/17/16

Oh, look, it’s my favorite kind of industrial accident, right after the kind that produces “Oops! All Berries” Cap’n Crunch: the kind that accidentally results in a comic strip being uploaded without any black in it! This will be probably fixed by the time you read this, but this is what the strip looked like when I found it. The panels are strangely beautiful, and definitely 100% less annoying now that you can’t read any of the dialogue or figure out exactly what’s going on.

Panels from Blondie, 1/17/16

“You don’t understand, Blondie! It’s just cheap and physical with Herb! He’s only for when you’re not available! You’ve gotta believe me!”