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Mary Worth, 11/8/13

I think we really need to start wondering if Mary Worth has reached its logical end state: with Mary in some kind of fugue state, possibly full of drugs on her deathbed, just fantasizing about people praising her. She’s not even imagining herself doing anything praiseworthy anymore; she’s just being lavished with praise for things she may or may not have done in the distant past. This is why Mary is looking so ecstatic in panel two: this is her dreamscape, so she can hear Shelly’s very thoughts, and knows that for her entire speech Sheylly will just be smiling beatifically and saying “Mary … Mary … thank you Mary … Mary … thank you … Mary …” for two or three hours.

Spider-Man, 11/8/13

Spider-Man’s thought balloons, meanwhile, are pretty much par for the course in terms of his general unlikeability. “Yeah, it’s such a burden seeing my wife’s hit play, the success of which is making her happy and supporting me financially. I can’t believe I have to keep doing this. Hey, someone just praised me, all right!”

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Spider-Man, 11/7/13

I mean … yes, he is? Everyone saw him? J. Jonah Jameson, you old rascal, I think you’ve finally found away to defeat Spider-Man: by just asking absurd counterfactual questions whenever anyone defends him. “In case you didn’t notice, there hasn’t been anyone reporting that their children have been kidnapped, so Spider-Man is innocent of your charge that he’s eaten thousands of New York City babies!” “But is he, Robbie? Is he??”

Dennis the Menace, 11/7/13

Dennis’s mounting anxiety over his future dreamscape combines with his mother’s crafty expression to make this panel one of the most chilling things I’ve seen today. We can never know exactly what she said to him during storytime tonight, but we now know that Alice wears the Mitchell family menacing crown.

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Here is a brief unpaid, unsolicited endorsement: Conor Lastowka, who writes for Rifftrax and co-curates the [Citation Needed] Tumblr with me and is generally hilarious, has, (unlike certain [Citation Needed] Tumblr co-curators who are still wrangling with book-length prose) finished a novel! It’s called Gone Whalin’ is about whaling, and time travel, and other exciting topics. You can check out the webpage or download the first three chapters or watch the book trailer or just buy it already!

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Mary Worth, 11/6/13

“This award isn’t so much for me, or the other humans who work and volunteer there, as it is for the shelter itself — the actual physical building. I mean, if you think about it, all the volunteers and staffers in the world couldn’t help the homeless if we didn’t have a building to put them in, am I right? We’d just be standing around outside holding umbrellas over their heads or something, and that wouldn’t be very helpful at all! Anyway, that’s why we sometimes let the building wrench the very souls of some of our clients out of their bodies and suck them into a terrifying hell-dimension through the nightmarish maw-portal that lurks in the basement. Yes, the process is fatal and horrifying, but if this wonderful, helpful building needs to feed on the life-essence of 20 percent or so of the people we house in order to sustain its demonic existence, who are we to complain?”

Crock, 11/6/13

Wow, I sure don’t remember a hat-and-diaper-clad chinless blob-horror being among the cast of beloved legacy strip Crock. Newspapers are correct to eschew any affiliation with whatever awful demonic babble is emerging from this abomination’s perversely grinning mouth-hole.

Hi and Lois, 11/6/13

“Ha ha but what if there was a baby who was also a cougar” –an idea that should’ve immediately been discarded, but was instead turned into the punchline of a nationally syndicated comic strip