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Judge Parker, 2/14/12

Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody! Did you ask for a sexy, sinister assassitrix from your Valentine, the syndicated continuity strip Judge Parker? Well, you got it! Monique Zatari will almost certainly be the villain in the current confusing Judge Parker whodunnit; her character exists not only to stir America’s most erotic fears about Middle Easterners, but also to right a four-year-old wrong. Remember the last time the good white people of Spencer-Parkerburg were menaced by a lady of Islamic extraction? Remember how we never got a sense of the size or shapeliness of her breasts? Well, you won’t be able to say that about Monique Zatari, by God.

Crankshaft, 2/14/12

I know I’m on the record as publicly not caring about the chronological inconsistencies that arise from the various time jump shenanigans in the Funkyverse, i.e., why did everyone in Funky Winkerbean discontinuously get 10 years older but their world is still contemporary with ours, did Crankshaft jump forward with Funky Winkerbean, etc. But I do find a different kind of time-problem interesting: namely, when a strip’s essentially timeless nature (i.e., it’s always happening now, no matter how long it’s been running with the characters the same age) runs up against decisions to fix important bits of character development to real points in history. If Crankshaft really was a minor league player in 1940 whose career was cut short by the outbreak of World War II, that makes him at minimum 88 years old now. Which means he … probably shouldn’t be working as a school bus driver? I’m sure that there are 88-year-olds out there now who do a fine job of driving large commercial vehicles, but they’re few and far between. Kudos to the strip for sticking to its guns, I guess, but maybe a quiet retrofitting of Crankshaft’s service to Korea might be in order?

Mary Worth, 2/14/12

Soooo … much as I’ve enjoyed Mary’s Dinner With The Moral Abyss That Is Nola so far, it is starting to get a bit repetitive! And Mary’s offer of advice reminds us that Nola arranged this meeting to get Mary’s thoughts on whether her boyfriend is cheating on her; of course, Mary would have no real way to offer an informed opinion on the matter, since Nola hasn’t supplied any details but instead has gone off on a long discursis on how awesome it is to have sex with other people’s husbands and not care about anybody’s opinions about anything. I’m beginning to think that maybe Nola is just stalling Mary while her accomplices are kidnapping Dr. Jeff or clearing out Mary’s safe deposit box or something. You might not approve of that, but Nola only has it all because she’s determined not to let anything stop her!

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Mark Trail, 2/13/12

It’s well known that in the moral universe of Mark Trail, kindness to animals is the highest value. So, let’s ask ourselves: who are the real villains in this story? Mark and Tommy, who left poor Butch the blind dog alone in a field with only a jacket for company, and who have gone back to Tommy’s comfortable home to plot how to exploit Butch for big-time TV money? Or Jeff and Jamie, who, despite being on the run from the law and hiding out in some rustic cabin, are prepared to take pity on a poor hungry dog they’ve never even met before? I certainly hope that, instead of punching, this storyline ends with Mark taking a long, hard look at what he’s become.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/13/12

Starting with a punchline (even a good one, which this is not) and working your way back to create the set-up is always a terrible, terrible idea in comics. I mean, can you figure out any context in which it would make sense for Snuffy, Parson Tuttle, and a quartet of nameless Hootin’ Holler elder ladies to be gathered around one of the community’s few working TV sets to try to pick up the Grammys on its bunny ears? I guess it’s possible that inveterate lawbreaker Snuffy and notorious grifter/fraud Tuttle lured the town’s grandmothers to this viewing as a cruel prank, knowing that they’d be embarrassed and horrified by the flatlanders’ outlandish music and whorish outfits. So, yeah, actually, this totally makes sense in the strip’s milieu, forget I said anything.

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Mark Trail, 2/12/12

Oh, hey, Mark, have you slipped something completely horrifying into the last panel of Sunday’s nature lesson? Yes, let’s all gaze upon the repulsive New Zealand flatworm, which has no natural predators. Presumably once they finish devouring all the earthworms available, they’ll start moving up the food chain, and by the time they get to humans they’ll be about six feet long and completely unstoppable. Fortunately, these monsters appear to be confined to island nations at the moment, but it’s probably best to eradicate all life in New Zealand and Great Britain with atomic fire, just to be sure.

Beetle Bailey, 2/12/12

Of course, it may already be too late for the rest of the world, as even members of the U.S. military appears to have been infected with awful mutagenic diseases that can transform them into horrific beast-men.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/12/12

And don’t forget, Crazy Harry, every birthday brings you closer to the moment when you’ll tumble through the narrows of the hourglass of time onto an awful pit of impaling spikes! ARE YOU SMILING AS YOU BLOW OUT THOSE CANDLES, WHY ARE YOU SMILING, BIRTHDAYS ARE FOR THINKING ABOUT DEATH AND ONLY DEATH