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Apartment 3-G, 11/24/10

Whew, thank goodness everything worked out for the best! Crazy taser lady Mrs. Bloom gets someone to look after her cat when she’s in Florida for two weeks or whatever, and all she has to do is allow an enormous piano to be stationed in her tiny Manhattan apartment indefinitely. And also Tommie’s Aunt Iris is going to live there while she’s gone, and maybe stick around after she gets back, who knows, she said in a Sunday strip that she likes to “have adventures,” and once a freewheeling adventuresome free spirit is ensconced rent-free on your couch, they’re pretty much there for the duration, if you know what I mean.

Mark Trail, 11/24/10

I worked many years as a freelancer, and I have to say that if I had been recruited by a shadowy government operative for a dangerous undercover mission, one so important that I couldn’t even fill my own wife in on the details, I wouldn’t have called up any of my clients to blab about it on an unsecured phone line. Still, it’s narratively important for Bill Ellis to hear about all this so he can blurt out everything Mark says over the phone so that in turn Kelly Welly, Mark Trail’s greatest ever recurring character, can find out about it and show up and ruin everything/make everything awesome.

You can see why Kelly might want to get out of the office, anyway, what with Bill simultaneously holding back her journalistic career and invading her personal space. Sure, the two of them might have dated a couple of times, and he taught her some techniques (so different from Mark’s!), but Kelly is obviously ready to put that chapter behind her and go screw up the Customs Department’s most ill-conceived sting operation ever.

Beetle Bailey, 11/24/10

Hey, everybody, the revolution is here, at long last! Its first target is General Halftrack. The revolution is even more misguided than I had imagined.

Archie, 11/25/10

Jughead is afraid of accidentally getting something of use out of his education; I, meanwhile, am fucking terrified of the grinning be-hatted hot dog monster that’s waving cheerily at him from the TV.

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Slylock Fox, 11/23/10

The duck on the left is a duly sworn officer of the law, representing a distant government in whatever isolated community he rules over at his whim with an iron fist, his tin star serving as all the excuse he needs to do and take what he wants. The duck on the right is a ruthless vigilante, answering to nobody and following only his own ethical code — and his own appetites. Can you tell the difference between the two? Are the appalling acts of violence the duck-dictator on the left perpetrates in his dusty border town justified by his government commission — or are they even less defensible as a result? By setting up on his own account, is the duck on the right arrogating power to himself that doesn’t belong to him — or is he merely replicating the process by which all governments have formed, and is perhaps prepared to do a better job than the authority he’s displacing? Also, what kind of vermin is hiding under the television set, seriously, it’s creeping me out.

Marvin, 11/23/10

I’m not sure what the point of this strip is supposed to be, but since it features the entire loathsome Marvin cast staring out at the reader in gobsmacked terror, presumably looking straight into the face of total economic catastrophe, I’m just going to go ahead and declare it the greatest Marvin of all time.

The Jumble, 11/23/10

Don’t let them tell you that clowns are the heir of a long and honorable tradition of performance, or that they live only to hear the laughter of children, or any kind of bullcrap like that. They’re just in it for the money. All clowns are interested in is money.

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Mary Worth, 11/22/10

I love the way that Jeff’s cane looms monstrously in the foreground of the second panel here. In a carefully constructed work of visual narrative, this close-up would hold symbolic meaning, perhaps representing the way Jeff has come to rely on Mary to deal with crises in his own family; or the strange emphasis might indicate foreshadowing — perhaps setting the stage for the scene where a heavily armed Jill arrives at the wedding intent on gunning down everyone wearing clothes or carrying bouquets that don’t meet her aesthetic approval, and Jeff defeats her using only his cane as a weapon. But this is Mary Worth, so it’s probably there just because the artist likes drawing canes. And hey, let’s draw it leaning up against the wall at an impossible angle! Sure, why not?

I knew that the wonderful/horrible “Citizen Cane” gag had appeared in Mary Worth before, but I assumed that it had been Dr. Jeff’s joke all along, and that now it was a conversational crutch (ha!) that he used whenever it came up in conversation. “See, I’m not a decrepit, enfeebled old man! I’m wittily commenting on my own need for physical support when I walk! You kids today think you invented ironic distance, don’t you? Well, someday your knees will be in constant pain, and you won’t even be able to put your skinny jeans or your vintage-store corduroys on without popping a fistful of Advil first, and you’ll be proud if you come up with something as funny as ‘Citizen Cane.’ Hey! Get back here! I’m talking to you!”

But a little search through the archives shows me that the joke was actually used by Ella, who was briefly Mary’s rival for Charterstone meddling supremacy before she left for parts unknown. Which raises a host of worrying questions. Did Jeff kill Ella and steal her cane, believing it to be the source of her supernatural powers? Is “Jeff” secretly Ella, wearing a very clever disguise for terrifying and inscrutable reasons? Or is the cane itself the motive force here, possessing first Ella and then Jeff, forcing them to engage in unspeakably evil acts?

The Jumble, 11/22/10

I don’t know why, but I’m kind of impressed that this Jumble office scene includes one of those weird tripodal speakerphone things that are often used to set up phone conferences, or at least were often used 10 years ago, when I last regularly participated in group calls in office conference rooms. I guess I just expect any white-collar workplace scene in the comics to be 30 years out of date at the minimum. I’m so satisfied by it that I’m not even going to pursue the whole story of how to protagonist managed to horribly injure himself getting donuts.