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Mary Worth, 2/1/13

OK, you knew and I knew that John Dill was going to get weird about Mary at some point in this storyline. The only questions were when and how. We now know the answer to when — it’s right now, right here, in front of a national TV audience (or maybe just the seven people currently watching Santa Royale’s public access cable station, I forget), but we’re still not sure of the how and frankly I’m on tenterhooks. Is the incredibly lifelike figurine of Mary he just carved out of marzipan with a butter knife meant to be an idol of pagan worship, and John will demand, wild-eyed, that the studio audience acknowledge Mary’s divine and terrible beauty? Or will he calmly wait until Mary notices the figure, and then, without breaking eye contact with her, pick it up and bite the head off before tossing it to the ground? Either way, next week is going to be amazing.

Spider-Man, 2/1/13

“Finally, I managed to work that Google bit into my quippery! I really feel like my repartee is going to be more up to date now.”

Garfield, 2/1/13

Garfield will do anything to feed his voracious appetites, Jon. Anything.

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Herb and Jamaal, 1/31/13

So, when does a comic make the jump from “funny little joke about life’s foibles” to “horribly depressing”? In the case of today’s Herb and Jamaal, that moment came when the artist decided to add such vivid emotion to Sarah’s face in panel one, as she briefly mistakes Herb’s clumsy reach for the lamp as an attempt to touch her affectionately. Is he going to hug me? Could this actually lead to sex? Haha, don’t be silly, Sarah, you’ve reached a “comfortable” point in your marriage, if you define “comfort” as “a cold, numbing absence of strong feelings of any kind.”

Dick Tracy, 1/31/13

I think traditionally Dick Tracy has used arrow-box-labels to identify the bits of gee-whiz technology the strip’s law-enforcement characters usually deploy. But since things like two-way wrist radios have now been superseded by boring, ordinary cell phones, I guess they’re just now going to be pointing out random objects. Architectural details in early 20th century mausoleums? Skeletons inside said mausoleums, which is exactly the sort of place you’d expect a skeleton to be? Sure, why not!

Spider-Man, 1/31/13

Say, what’s our good friend the Amazing Newspaper Spider-Man been up to since he was physically present when Kraven’s plot was foiled? Well, after finding out that one of his old nemeses was up to his old tricks in San Francisco, he decided to hitchhike from Las Vegas to San Francisco, because of poverty. (Isn’t MJ making decent money as a Broadway actress, enough to subsidize a bus trip or perhaps even coach-class plane travel? Maybe she quite wisely refuses to give him access to her bank account.) Then the guy who picked him up tried to rob him at gunpoint, and then he crushed the barrel of the gun with his bare hands, without the usual seven strips of agonizing about “oh, no, my secret identity,” presumably because whatever happens on I-15 several hours outside of Vegas stays on I-15 several hours outside of Vegas. Today’s strip made me laugh because of how devastated our ne’er-do-well is at the prospect of spending a few minutes looking for his keys in a roadside ditch. I’m thinking if you threaten someone with a gun and he turns out to have superhuman strength, this is probably one of the better possible outcomes?

Slylock Fox, 1/31/13

“So, what’re you doing, bro? I’m just gettin’ baked, makin’ calls on my fuzzy phone, and taking a bath in a tub full of pancake batter.”

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Archie, 1/30/13

OK, when it comes to “what year are the Archie reruns from, and what weird violence has been done to the text and art to make them seem vaguely contemporary,” I … I don’t even know anymore? Like, obviously there’s some kind of chronological discontinuity going on here, or else why would Veronica, in a public place, call Archie “on his cell” from what appears to be a wall-mounted pay phone? And yet nothing about the joke makes sense if Archie doesn’t have a portable phone-type device on him. My guess is that in the original version of the strip Archie had a pager, which puts the date probably in the late-ish ’90s. Because there was this whole trend of kids having pagers then, right? Am I remembering that correctly? Or maybe Archie is a drug dealer? And this is why Reggie didn’t sell out Archie immediately, as he normally would, because now he and Archie and Jughead are in a drug gang? The least terrifying drug gang in America?

Gil Thorp, 1/30/13

Have you ever looked at your hand? Like, really looked at your hand? Like, really examined all the weird nubs and fleshy protuberances, and imagined high-fiving someone with an identically freaky hand, big paws just slapping all meatily together, and gone into a gibbering fit where you want nothing so much as to saw your hands off at the wrist, so you never have to look at them again?