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Archie, 11/14/13

I love that Mr. Weatherbee looks nothing but horrified in each and every panel of this strip. Right from the beginning he’s hunched over and anxious and clutching tightly onto his lapel; it’s not like he’s under any illusions that the superintendent has anything good to say about Riverdale High, after all. And yet the actual report is obviously much, much worse than even he had imagined. Sure, the final panel, in which he’s broken out into full-on panic sweats, is great, but it’s the second panel, in which he realizes that he’s only beginning to understand the meaning of terror and his mind won’t stop screaming inside his skull, is one of my favorite things in Newspaper Archie ever.

Momma, 11/14/13

Wait, did today’s strip and yesterday’s get swapped? Or are Francis and MaryLou just going to keep making Momma go out into the snow until she freezes to death for real?

Mark Trail, 11/14/13

These two panels of insect talk are preeettty boring, so just imagine how dull the two days of fly fishing we’ve mercifully skipped over must’ve been!

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Funky Winkerbean, 11/13/13

I’ve settled into a sort of Stockholm Syndrome thing with Funky Winkerbean, where I’ve decided that, since I’m apparently going to keep reading it indefinitely, and it’s going to keep being an endless pit of misery and death indefinitely, I’ve got to figure out how to enjoy it. My current strategy is to enjoy it when the misery and death happen to characters I particularly dislike, so this week’s plot, which has been focused on Les’s inability to write a maudlin direct-to-cable movie about his wife’s death, has been pretty pleasing to me. You might recall that this story began months ago with Les getting a fat check and then getting smug about some of the clunkiest dialogue ever written. But now he’s realized that he can never write a script about his beloved dead wife, because he can’t really imagine what her thoughts were, probably because when she was alive he was too busy thinking about how her various life tragedies were affecting him emotionally to really get to know her. Somehow this didn’t prevent him from writing a best-selling memoir about her, of course, but to write a screenplay he needs to know her every thought, since obviously movies focus much more closely on characters’ internal emotional lives than books do.

Anyway, the Les-suffering is unfortunately about to end, because now he’s going to read Lisa’s diary! The diary he swore never to read, for some reason! This will solve all his problems and probably he’ll just take big chunks of prose out of the diary and use them in his screenplay and he won’t even have to pay Lisa for it, because she’s dead.

Apartment 3-G, 11/13/13

Speaking of death, I’m dying with laughter at Governor Sexy having his extremely public marriage proposal interrupted in one of the most humiliating ways possible. The YouTube video of this delightful moment will of course go viral, with the autotuned version “I Have To Take This Call (It’s Marty)” becoming a surprise novelty hit on iTunes.

Dennis the Menace, 11/13/13

Everyone in the Mitchell family takes on whatever chores need doing, dividing them up equitably without regards to outdated gender norms, and Dennis doesn’t care who knows it! He truly is a menace — to the patriarchy.

Momma, 11/13/13

Frankly, the whole “Momma was very cold outside” angle of this strip seems overly complex, don’t you think? I mean, Momma is haunted by the grim spectre of death at all times and would presumably be quick with a depressing quip in response to a “Isn’t it great to be alive” no matter what the circumstances, though she might lean less towards “Let me check to see if I’m still alive” and more towards “I am alive and it isn’t great at all; it’s actually quite awful.” Still, the way MaryLou is leaning on the question, combined with Francis’s sly look, makes me think that something more is up here, like maybe they dumped her a snowdrift a mile away and made her walk back home, and are now trying to subtly ask her if she’s dead or not.

Blondie, 11/13/13

Ha ha, it sure is hard to keep up with the slang that the kids today use! In unrelated news, Alexander suffered some kind of traumatic brain injury at football practice.

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Apartment 3-G, 11/12/13

Handsome Governor Peter has been plotting to make Lu Ann his First Lady for some time, but clearly he’s been waiting for the perfect moment: at an extremely public event, in front of New York’s social and political elite, so that saying no will be incredibly humiliating and awkward for everyone involved. I thought Paul Linksy won the Using Social Pressure To Force An Ambivalent Lu Ann To Marry You Lifetime Award for all time when he surprise-proposed to her in front of his chanting extended family on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, but the governor is on the verge of really taking things to the next level here, what with all the reporters from major media outlets in attendance.

Lockhorns, 11/12/13

The best part of this comic is that there doesn’t actually seem to be any party going on here! Just Leroy lighting up a crapload of candles on Loretta’s birthday cake, so he can insult her. Probably he gave her the hat, too. Probably she was excited for maybe as much as 30 seconds, because she thought Leroy actually arranged a nice little moment for her on her birthday. Probably we’re seeing her face settle into an epic Locknornean frown just at the moment when she realizes, again, that her life is nothing but a series of bitter emotional disappointments.

Blondie, 11/12/13

Do you enjoy people vaguely flirting by naming different American regional dishes? Then today’s Blondie is for you, my friend!