Post Content

Mark Trail, 8/13/15

OH MY GOD

MARK TRAIL HAS BEEN EXPOSED TO RADIATION

WILL HE BE MUTATED INTO A NEW SUPERHERO FOR A NEW AGE????

Let’s see, Spider-Man got all the powers of a spider when he was bitten by a radioactive spider, and Mark’s been irradiated by a bunch fo radioactive rods, so … he’s going to gain all the powers of a rod? Or maybe a guy named Rod? Rod-Man, Rod-Man, does whatever Rod/a rod (A-Rod?) can? This seems like an extremely boring angle on superheroic origins, but I’m willing to see where the strip goes with it.

Mary Worth, 8/13/15

This dinnertime conversation is in fact surpassing my wildest expectations for hypnotically fascinating dullness. Damn it, Ian, this poor man has already debased himself by taking a job at your pissant little university — don’t make him live in one of the little shitbox apartments in this crumbling late ’60s condo complex too! Leave him the scrap of dignity that living in a real house represents! Meanwhile, Toby is squeezing her eyes shut and thinking about her tiny sculptures as hard as she can, which I have to imagine is her strategy for sex with Ian as well.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/13/15

Boy, Lukey sure looks awfully sad. You don’t suppose Elivney … ate the goat? Right in front him? I’m pretty sure she ate the goat, guys.

Post Content

Blondie, 8/12/15

The structure of the joke in this strip is straightforward enough: Dagwood feels good about himself, a state of affairs that will soon be undone by his abusive rage-monster of a boss. But something about the way that everyone around him keeps shouting “Dag swag!” at him seems profoundly off. Are we to view the entire strip as a dream sequence, in which Dagwood’s exaggerated sense of importance and centrality will soon be inverted into persecution at the hands of a cruel father figure? Or is this catchphrase intended to establish the name of a line of Blondie-branded menswear, in a second and hopefully less disastrous attempt to cash in on the strip’s intellectual property?

Pluggers, 8/12/15

You’re a plugger if you’re a hideous man-beast who, despite walking upright and wearing clothes and owning property, still has the unshakable urge to establish dominance within your kin-group by aggressively urinating in your offspring’s newly established territory.

Post Content

Mary Worth, 8/11/15

I moved to Baltimore in 2002, and, as was the style at the time, subscribed to home delivery of the local print newspaper, which had four glorious pages of comics, including the soap opera strips, which I had never really read before. The Mary Worth storyline in progress at the time involved a cantankerous old man named Smitty Smedlap, who was in the midst of a dinner with Mary and Jeff at the Bum Boat that, I swear to God, lasted for weeks, much of which spent with him complaining that he didn’t like fish (or, as he called it, “feesh”). I found it riveting, not least because, as the dinner unspooled day after day, I wasn’t sure who, if anyone, I was supposed to like. Was this dinner unusually comically full of mutual irritation for the strip, or was everything like this? Thus, I have high hopes that this meal will go on interminably as well, with Ian increasingly desperately trying to convince his boss to move into his condo complex for the most tenuous of reasons; in this case, though, any newcomers wondering how exactly they’re supposed to understand what’s happening will be helped out by Toby’s “can you get a load of this shit” facial expression.

Dennis the Menace, 8/11/15

Dennis the Menace has definitely crossed some kind of line today by having a panel in which Dennis isn’t present and Mr. Wilson says a cranky old man thing that isn’t Dennis-related at all. Is America ready for this feature to slowly become entirely Wilson-centric, with each day’s “joke” consisting of Mr. Wilson angrily informing his wife or some unfortunately passerby that things today are bad, especially things that involve or cater to young people? I’ll bet it is!