Post Content

It’s Thanksgiving in the United States, everybody! What are you thankful for?

Mary Worth, 11/25/10

Are you thankful that some terrible combination of painkillers and terror hasn’t led you to make an ill-advised proposal of marriage to Mary Worth?

Dick Tracy, 11/25/10

Are you thankful that Dick Tracy is finally going to take on the killer whose name everyone knows — the police? (“My God, 911 is a joke!” Dick muses.)

Dennis the Menace, 11/25/10

Are you thankful that you’re not forced to drink glasses of gravy, like Dennis and Joey? I’m not. I’m sad that I’m not allowed to do so. Enjoy your gravy, everybody!

Post Content

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.

Post Content

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.