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Mary Worth, 5/4/12

Oooh, it’s a surprise wedding! This rates about a 3 in “actual surprise revelations” but maybe as high as an 8 in “surprise revelations that one might reasonably expect in a Mary Worth plotline.” Still, as our heroine gasps in three-part harmony with other guests, does it look like her beaming smile from the first panel has crumpled a bit? I mean, she’s just been denied a host of wedding-related meddling pleasures: she’ll have no opportunities to give passive-aggressive advice to Gina, first hinting that she’s spending too much and then implying that she’s being cheap; she won’t have time to perfectly calibrate her gift choice so that the couple will hate it but still feel awkward returning it; she’ll barely have time to ask prying questions to their families and find out the deep-seated emotional problems that will lead to their inevitable divorce in 18 to 36 months. C’mon, Mary, start working the room, now! We are running out of time.

Blondie, 5/4/12

I’m going to do my best to avoid contemplating Dagwood’s phallic torso, though I will give kudos to the syndicate coloring drones for reading enough of the dialogue to make his shirt green. I do find it pretty funny that Elmo can just wander into the Bumsteads’ house with his friends, like Dagwood is some weird, exotic pet that he’s letting them look at.

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Mark Trail, 5/3/12

“Oh, man, why is Josh focusing so much attention on this Mark Trail storyline when there’s other things happening in the comics pages,” said absolutely nobody because this Mark Trail storyline is the greatest achievement in storytelling since the invention of writing. Today we have a classic Mark Trail trope in action, which is Just Leave The Bad Guys Tied Up. Ha ha, look at those guys, stone cold defeated by a good smack to the head/vicious dog attack, there’s literally no way they could wriggle out of those ropes (Ranger Tom was surely a Boy Scout) and definitely no way that they had any kind of accomplices helping them run the massive grow operation that Ranger Tom now realizes exists all over the forest he’s supposed to kind of be in charge of. Nope, they’ll be there when the “clean-up crew” arrives, and I’m just starting to consider that maybe the “clean-up crew” are not so much “trained marijuana disposal experts” as “guys I know who aren’t afraid to kill some drug growers execution-style and bury them in shallow forest graves, since any legal proceedings might bring to light evidence of neglect that would negatively reflect on my job performance.” But, better to not be there for that unpleasantness, blood stains are hard to get out of khaki, let’s just go back to Lost Forest and have some late-night pancakes instead. Mmmm, pancakes!

Hi and Lois, 5/3/12

Is it weird that I find this incredibly creepy? Lois has left her eyes all over the house … watching … ALWAYS WATCHING.

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Judge Parker, 5/2/12

Just to keep you Judge Parker non-obsessives in the loop, Katherine is actually Randy’s stepmom, a sexy lady (because this is Judge Parker, natch) who appears to be roughly Randy’s age but who nevertheless does in fact consider him to be her beloved son, so her momzilla intervention in his upcoming nuptials are sure to be super creepy on a number of levels. But, while I am always here to keep you up to date the quasi-Oedipal goings on in the continuity strips, I can’t offer any coherent explanation as to why Randy has chosen to decorate his judge’s chambers with an enormous bust of Homer. I mean, I’m not a miracle worker.

Mark Trail, 5/2/12

“It was these drug plants that got me excited!” Ha ha, some days this blog just writes itself. I’ll bet the drug-destroying team is going to be super-excited too!

Apartment 3-G, 5/2/12

Hey, if you ever find yourself working in the Pentagon’s PR department and need to write a press release that says something along the lines of “We had to destroy that village in order to save it,” why not try “As usual, our kindness was totally misunderstood”?