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Mary Worth, 1/24/11

Attention, manufacturers of electronic gadgets and gizmos! Have you saturated all conventional media with ads for your iPad/Kindle/Nook/whatever? Are you wondering how to reach that lucrative 65-and-older shut-in demographic? There’s no way to get more value for your marketing dollar than to purchase product placement in Mary Worth. Oldsters everywhere will soon be using your product to read their favorite old-timey books once they see their hip comic contemporaries, like Mary Worth’s Dr. Jeff, extol the virtue of your reader on the funny pages. The conversation beginning today is guaranteed to last weeks, and all generic references to “that reading device” can be changed to your product name as soon as your check clears.

Marmaduke, 1/24/11

Don’t worry, Marmaduke’s owners! The Pied Piper led away rats to be killed and then stole children to sell them into slavery. Marmaduke isn’t doing anything like that! He’s merely enlisting a hellish menagerie of beasts into his demon army, the better to overthrow the humans and establish his awful nightmare reign here on earth.

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Beetle Bailey, 1/23/11

This is, without doubt, the saddest Beetle Bailey I’ve ever seen, sadder than all the “Beetle and Sarge have a forbidden love for one another” strips combined. Never mind the fact that Beetle’s family lives in some kind of bygone day when hand-written letters constitute the only means of communication at a distance; Beetle’s brother’s speculation that the soldier no longer loves his family is all the more heartbreaking for being so matter-of-fact. But the real emotional gut punch comes in the final panel. Little Chigger is young or stupid enough to think that the mere receipt of a letter is enough to maintain the emotional ties within the Bailey family; but the expressions on the faces of his parents show how devastated they are by Beetle’s affectless, demanding letter. They’ll send the money — if that’s the only way they can keep the thin thread between themselves and their son in place, they’ll do it — but something inside them has been snuffed out.

As a side note: Beetle’s brother is named “Chigger”? Really? As you may or may not know, Hi and Lois‘s Lois is Beetle’s sister, so we have to wonder what her real name was — Ladybug? — before she got married and fled this sad, creepy family for good.

Crankshaft, 1/23/11

Oh, look, it’s another cheery day in the Funkyverse. Today, we learn that you can either be driven mad by the horrible scratching of the vermin that live in your walls, or you can turn up the TV and be deafened with awful news about our nation’s economic crisis. Those are your choices!

Panel from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/23/11

Here’s the question I want to ask, doctor: why are you having Loweezy lower Li’l Tater into that enormous pie shell? How many more infants will you need to complete your monstrous baby pie, and who will be eating it?

Panels from Dennis the Menace, 1/23/11

Ah, the narcotic of television sedates unruly children and elders alike, putting them into a trance-like state so that they won’t bother you with their irritating opinions or desires. I preserve the first panel here mainly to note that Dennis the Menace has finally caught up to 1999, with unsettling results.

Hagar the Horrible, 1/23/11

Ha ha, it’s funny because spending time doing things with your wife that she enjoys is worse than the most heinous physical torture!

Hi and Lois, 1/23/11

Ha ha, it’s funny because an open and honest relationship with your wife will be seen by your male friends as a betrayal!

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Mary Worth, 1/22/10

What an appropriate epigraph for this strip! Just as the silence of John Cage’s 4′ 33″ allows the audience to hear everyday and incidental sounds anew, so too has the mental silence of Mary’s forced forgetting allowed Jill to hear the quiet, clear voices in her head, the ones urging suicide.

Archie, 1/22/10

The Archie gang’s experiment with polyamory does not appear to be going well! Guys, it’s important that you negotiate with your primary partners to establish mutually agreed parameters of relationships with secondary partners if this is going to work.

Luann, 1/22/10

Shannon’s preparation for her future life as a deranged but charismatic dictator is going disturbingly well.