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Mary Worth, 4/26/10

So I was talking to my mother about Mary Worth yesterday (AS IT’S TOTALLY NORMAL FOR A 35-YEAR-OLD MAN TO DO, RIGHT?) and we were discussing what the big reveal would be in this storyline. She thought it was just going to be some compulsive shopping with a little overspending thrown in for good measure; I was convinced that we were heading on to some full-on hoarding. Of course, it’s always awesome to be proven right, but I have to say I’m a little disappointed in the quality of the hoarding on display here. Yes, there are a lot of boxes and bags stacked up, but in fairly tidy piles, and even the occasional loose garment is neatly laid out on the couch or even hanging up on something conveniently off-panel. While it’s surely problematic, and in violation of Charterstone regulations (and don’t think Mary isn’t taking careful mental notes as she attempts to console Bonnie), it just doesn’t display the level of squalor that I was hoping for. Where are the six-foot-tall tangled piles of dresses, tags still on? The tunnels dug out through piles of newspaper to allow movement from room to room? The dead animals? Sorry, guys, you’re going to have get a lot more harrowing to reach “very special episode” status.

Mark Trail, 4/26/10

Actually, Mark, that’s not so much a “suggestion” as what looks to be as close as you could ever get to an erotic reverie. I dearly hope that ellipsis at the end of Mark’s word balloon in the final panel presages days or perhaps even weeks of our hero waxing rhapsodic about the awesomeness of nature in all of its quiet glory, including a graphic description of what fish guts sound like falling slimily to the bottom of a boat anchored in an otherwise silent cove, as his captive audience can only watch on in stunned silence.

Since this is Mark Trail, where your fortunes are almost entirely dependent whether Mark has taken a shine to you, I’m presuming his suggestion will be that float planes and “big motors” be banned all over the lake, except for around the camp where his friend and his sexy daughter live, since they need float planes and motorboats to keep their business alive. The Parker Brothers will of course be bankrupted as well as arrested. Another problem solved according to Arbitrary Trailian Justice, which can sting as badly as any fist!

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Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/25/10

Loweezy recoils in horror from this suggestion, as she knows all too well that her happy relationship with her husband rests entirely on a series of mutual deceptions.

Panel from The Phantom, 4/25/10

The financial services industry must have pretty low approval ratings if a glowering figure setting on a skull-bedecked throne might reasonably be presented as an anti-Wall Street avenger.

Beetle Bailey, 4/25/10

General Halftrack, it turns out, is the world’s least erotic blow-up sex doll.

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Blondie, 4/24/10

Why do cartoonists feel like they can’t say the actual names of products and companies in the comics? Today’s Blondie is fairly transparently referencing the “Flame” meat-scented body spray put out by Burger King. Are there trademark issues, or fears of lawsuits? Perhaps Blondie was hoping to reap product placement money from Burger King, and decided to go with this genercized reference only after the elaborate negotiations for that deal collapsed, which would explain why Dagwood is reading an article in the paper describing a product that was released nearly a year and a half ago.

Of course, this doesn’t get at the core horror of the strip. What foul meat-based sex perversions did Blondie agree to participate in on the Bumsteads’ tenth anniversary? Surely the barbecue sauce behind the ears (and whose ears?) were only the start of it. She’s still so ashamed all these years later that she won’t even make eye contact with her husband, or us.

Apartment 3-G, 4/24/10

“I mean, sure, wimps might think that having a crazy woman wave a gun in your face constitutes something bad happening in and of itself, but I say that so long as nobody gets shot, it’s just one of those moments of adrenaline-soaked terror that really make you feel alive, in the long run! Anyway, like I was saying I graduated from the school of bad choices — choices, like, say, throwing myself at a man who enabled his girlfriend’s pill habit and then had her bundled away to a mental hospital when she got too crazy. That’s good boyfriend material right there!”