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Mary Worth, 4/8/14

It tells you a lot about Mary Worth as a strip that this storyline about a drug dealing ex-con trying to find his way in mainstream society has mainly been about the quasi-romantic relationship between the ex-con’s mother and a bald advice columnist, and it tells you a lot about me as a person that I’ve been loving every minute of it. Anyway, Wilbur’s attempt to win Iris’s love by driving a wedge between her and Tommy seems to be going exactly as planned! “Yesssss,” he thinks, “women always get super mad at you before they do sex things with you, right? We’re going to do so many sexy things, after I tell her to kick Tommy out. But not yet, Wilbur, not yet! You need to play that trump card at just … the right … moment.”

Mark Trail, 4/8/14

After being savagely beaten by a civilian vigilante, Marlin is finally being taken into custody by legitimate law enforcement officers, and while they’ll probably protect him from further arbitrary physical violence, they are subjecting him to the ultimate insult: symbolically stripping him of his whimsical nickname. No longer will he be permitted to refer to himself as “Marlin”! Noms de taxidermy are reserved for legitimate, non-poaching taxidermists! In the joint he will be known as “Ethan Fauscett,” and he will definitely suffer for it.

Apartment 3-G, 4/8/14

At last, someone is saying what we’ve all been thinking, and it’s Doctor Whatshisname, the large animal vet! I mean, he’s being kinda of harsh about it, but frankly the A3G girls could stand to have the phrase “helpless freak” shouted at them more often.

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• Fundraiser reward note: Thanks to all who contributed to last month’s fundraiser! As of today, everyone who has confirmed their address and reward desires with me has had their reward sent off in the mail. Please let me know if you don’t see it in about a week or so. That said, 31 of you gave enough to get a reward but never replied to my email asking which rewards you wanted and whether I have the right address for you. I’ve been burned often enough by Paypal passing along an incorrect address that I don’t send out rewards until I have this confirmation; if you haven’t received an email from me, please check your spam filter or just write me at bio@jfruh.com and we’ll talk!
• Website technical thingie note: I’ve tweaked the formatting for the site again, so if things look really wonky, you may need to reload the page while holding down the shift key, and if that doesn’t work, you might need to clear your browser cache.

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Website technical thingie note: Hey all, I’ve tweaked the formatting for the site again, so if things look really wonky, you may need to reload the page while holding down the shift key, and if that doesn’t work, you might need to clear your browser cache.

Dennis the Menace, 4/7/14

OK, so I get that if you came up with a joke about “what if the Venus de Milo wanted to do some texting, but she couldn’t? eh? eh? because she hasn’t got any arms? eh?” and you had a nationally syndicated comic panel where your jokes could go, this would be hard to resist. That said, there’s a lot of setup to this joke that has to be glossed over, with the most important aspect being that the Venus de Milo is in the Louvre, which means that the Mitchells, who have never been seen before doing anything more exotic than driving to tourist traps in their station wagon, have packed up Dennis and taken him to France. I feel like we were deprived a number of potential gags of various menacing levels here — Dennis sullenly resists Margaret’s attempt to teach him even a rudimentary amount of French, Dennis announces at the TSA checkpoint that he’s packed something dangerous and/or alive in his suitcase, Dennis loudly says “But dad, he doesn’t look like a frog at all!” in front of a Frenchman Henry is trying to impress, etc. Honestly, the fact that they’re standing in front of a topless statue means that a Dennis-makes-reference-to-human-sexuality-and-everyone-is-uncomfortable is a much more likely and entertaining scenario here than some dumb texting joke.

Hagar the Horrible, 4/7/14

So it appears that, while concubinage was common in early Norse society, Vikings didn’t really practice polygamy except at the very top of the social pyramid, and certainly Hagar, the leader of a smallish and incompetent war band, doesn’t qualify. Nevertheless, this strip is an interesting look at how attitudes might differ in a culture where marriages are thought of not primarily as a romantic attachment between two people but as a basic unit of economic production.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/7/14

Oh, it looks like Jess is going to take another stab at making a movie about her dad, John Darling! She has to refer to him as “my dad, John Darling” whenever she brings him up, because she only brings him up every year or so. Anyway, today she acknowledges that all human endeavor is basically a race against the final destruction of our planet, a race that can seem easy to lose when you’re smothered under a heavy blanket of depressive torpor.

Better Half, 4/7/14

At last, Stanley has found a phone sex line that caters to his fairly specific needs.