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Momma, 4/6/14

Usually Momma focuses on Momma as an overbearing, controlling monster who insists of being negative about every aspect of her children’s’ lives, and to my mind, the strip doesn’t spend enough time exploring another aspect of her personality: her bottomless greed. She’s often distressed that Francis doesn’t have a good job, or (because of her strict adherence to traditional gender roles) that MaryLou’s suitors don’t have good jobs, and this is generally presented as being an aspect of the whole controlling-her-children’s-lives thing. But as this dream sequence reveals, Momma also just straight up wants money, and since she’s old and unemployable and presumably living on some combination of Social Security and her late husband’s meager pension, her only hope of accessing money comes from her children. I mean, look at this! She’s literally sitting in a boat full of money with dollar signs floating over her head sailing towards what appears to be a gold-plated mansion and she’s never been happier in her life. It’s like she’s in a rap video, for pete’s sake.

Crock, 4/6/14

None of the Crock characters have anything resembling psychological depth, and Captain Preppie, whose whole personality can be summed up as “Handsome, cartoonishly narcissistic ladies’ man”, is shallower than most. Still, today’s strip is intriguing, exploring what happens to someone like this forced to live for years in an isolated desert fortress. The throwaway panels demonstrate his slide from garden-variety egotism to madness, as his love for his own handsome mug summons up eerie visions of dozens of identical Preppie-faces, grown in petri dishes in some awful lab somewhere. Only marginally less disturbing is the main action, in which the crazed Captain obsessively combs the sand around the fort for imperfections, ranting about “clutter,” while his soldiers look on.

Spider-Man, 4/6/14

Awww, looks like J.J.J. has decided that Spider-Man is too pathetic to kill! This won’t be the lamest victory Spidey has ever scored, but it’s definitely in the top decile for lameness.

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Mark Trail, 4/5/14

Kinda sad Mark is ENDING THIS today, though it’s hard to see how anything could have topped the first panel of today’s strip, as Mark forcibly tackles Marlin into the shallow waters where sea turtles will now be able to frolic without fear of having their eggs poached. I certainly hope that the copter-borne police got a good look at that squirming mass of bejeaned legs, protruding from the lake like some kind of denim-clad sea anemone.

Judge Parker, 4/5/14

At first glance, this seems like a touching conversation between the fathers of two young people who are about to get married — until you find out that what they’ve been talking about over the course of this week’s strips is that April’s dad wronged some Romanian arms dealers, who are even now bearing down on this heavily armed jungle compound in a helicopter gunship, determined to kill everyone. Alan wants to know even more, though! What sort of ordinance do their enemies carry? How many civil wars has April’s dad helped perpetuate through his arms-dealing business, and how profitable has that been over the years? Has the ability to manufacture powerful weapons relatively cheaply ended the nation-state’s monopoly on violence forever?

B.C., 4/5/14

Ha ha, it’s funny because Secret Service agents have repeatedly gotten in trouble for paying for sex over the past few years! This is the sort of thing that angry parents would be writing into papers about demanding to know “How am I supposed to explain this to my children?” if anyone young enough to have young children still got a newspaper delivered at home. Anyway, in related news, Secret Service agents are very much not in the military.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 4/5/14

Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm is about how life is an endless series of bland, mind-numbing experiences that we undertake to stave off death, which honestly makes me nostalgic for the jokes about piano-fucking.

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Hey all, just a quick note to those of you who are in the Baltimore region and casting about for things to do tonight: you should come see Everything All The Time, a fab variety show, at the Metro Gallery in Station North! Here’s a picture of a flyer hanging in a window:

The part of “Gary The Emotionally Insecure Substitute Yoga Instructor” will be played by “me”! Here’s a Facebook event with all the info that’s in the picture!

You would be very emotionally secure if you were the one who came up with this great comment of the week:

“I like Wilbur’s single-fistin’ foot-long-eatin’ form in this Mary Worth: no sissy ‘double-handing’ techniques like the college students on the BK-Lounge ads for this experienced campaigner.” –TicketyBo

You should not feel bad about being a runner up, either!

“Also, as long as we’re completely awake and lucid, female Reggie, I’d like to compliment you on your all-purple furniture … It really compliments how the walls are melting into the floor. Also I would like to request your assistance in prying this crown off my head since it seems to have achieved sentience and is engulfing my soul.” –Tophat

“Gotta pay for those pharmaceuticals somehow. Plug Life!” –pugfuggly

“OK, so between panel one and panel two of today’s Apartment 3-G, the fawn morphed from deer to chupacabra. For once, I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s A3G.” –Voshkod

Luann: “Brad wants a huge wedding, so they can invite … who? His parents, Luann, T.J., Toni’s brother, Shannon, and some generic unidentified people from the fire department? I think he’s severely overestimated the size of his supporting cast.” –Joshua

“From our outpost in suburban Palermo we note several items today worthy of comment. However, we shall restrict ourselves to Dr. [Rex] Morgan’s teal shirt. Really, Doctor? Teal is for chiropractors.” –Fashion Police

Apartment 3-G: “Wait, is that a hi-rise building just on the other side of the trees from a compound that’s only accessible by a long and barely-passable dirt road? Omigod Omigod Omigod, ‘Happiness Falls’ is a neighborhood in Brooklyn. This is truly breaking new ground for this strip, as will the rap-rhyme spitting, fawn-eating street horse in tomorrow’s panels.” –The Rt. Venerable Pasdordan

“Is the vet enlisting Tommie’s help in euthanizing the world’s only invisible horse?” –DAS

“We were somewhere around a table on the inside of Jerry’s Sandwich Shop when the mayonnaise began to take hold.” –Dood

“Wow, Gizmo’s like a one-man steampunk DARPA. I hope he gets killed, the hipster fuck.” –Doctor Handsome

“I’ve been out of the country for a while, when did pluggers start changing their underwear?” –SF_Reader

“Oh, I don’t know. At least ‘yellowfin tuna’ is metrically equivalent (dactyl, trochee) to ‘Louisville Slugger’, so the caption makes some sense, in a free-associational, ichthyoschizophrenic way.” –Dr. Y. Zowl

“‘Bleat, bleat’ doesn’t strike me as cries of hunger as much as it seems to be the fawn’s sardonic comments on this moronic conversation.” –cheech wizard

Thanks to everyone who put some scratch in my tip jar! And, just as an advertising program note, I’ve started using BuySellAds as a platform for you to buy ads directly on my site on a CPM basis. To find out more, you can go to my BuySellAds page or just click here.