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Mark Trail, 4/3/10

Man, Moe and Joe Parker are really working overtime to prove that they are in fact the greatest comedy duo in the business today. They’re interrupted in the midst of ruminating business-wise on the complex reality of being cogs in the illegal wildlife meat supply chain when they spot a guy with a camera, causing them to burst out with possibly the most hilarious exclamation ever committed to newsprint: “HEY, IT’S THAT GUY WITH A CAMERA!” Sorry, Mark, it doesn’t matter if you switch up the camera you’re using — so long as you’re that guy, and you’ve got a camera you’re toting around with you, you’re that guy with a camera, and the Parker Brothers have your number.

Also, the Parkers are apparently so dumb that they can at any given time hold in their memory only the most recent incident of fisticuffs or near-fisticuffs that their family was involved in; otherwise they’d identify Mark not as “that guy with a camera” but rather “that guy we held back while we kicked that senator’s ass.” Of course, Mark didn’t have a camera back then, which is probably why they don’t recognize him.

Beetle Bailey, 4/3/10

Today’s Beetle Bailey demonstrates how tricky it can be to reconcile the rhythm necessary for snappy marital hate-repartee onto the need to have some visual variety in your comic strip. Obviously, if both panels in today’s strip took place in the doctor’s waiting room, we’d be denied that lovingly detailed and charming drawn depiction of the Halftracks’ car; but the chronology established by the scene shift creates a weird gap between Mrs. Halftrack’s cruel zingers. It’s possible that the General is still kind of stunned from learning that he needs major surgery, and so his wife is having to make her insults less and less subtle in order to get through to him:

GENERAL HALFTRACK: The doctor says I need a hip replacement!
MRS. HALFTRACK: That’s a good start.
[Five minutes later, as they drive home]
MRS. HALFTRACK: I can think of a lot of other parts that need replacing.
[Half an hour later, as they sit and watch TV]
MRS. HALFTRACK: I’m talking about your dick, and your face. Both of those. I wish you had new ones.

Mary Worth, 4/3/10

Mary needs to learn that desperation is never attractive, as she uses her suddenly hulking shoulders to pin Bonnie to the spot. “Think about what I said! Talking can help! It can help me! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, LET ME MEDDLE YOU! I NEED THIS.”

Family Circus, 4/3/10

Big Daddy Keane has of course been “dyeing” inside, by degrees, for the past seven years or so. Billy’s supposed to be seven, right?

Apartment 3-G, 4/3/10

I’m reasonably sure that there were any number of incidents in Margo’s childhood that played out more or less like this.

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Apartment 3-G, 3/2/10

YES YES YES OUR GREATEST MOST AWESOME SUSPICIONS HAVE BEEN CONFIRMED! Margo’s father’s wife, the one she believed was her mother for some unspecified stretch of her childhood and adolescence, the one Margo calls “Roberta,” is, as predicted, none other than our beloved shrink-schtupping manic-depressive Bobbie! Even this initial exchange between the two provides evidence of the fraught family history, as our pill-crazed avenging angel has, in her pharmaceutical haze, mistaken the changeling she raised for the once-young immigrant maid her husband cheated on her with. If only Bobbie knew that Margo was as disgusted by Martin and Gabriella’s gross love for one another as she is! They should be joining forces in their joint battle against all genuine human affection, not fighting amongst themselves!

The only question is: why is Bobbie lurking invisibly in the shadows at the bottom of the staircase? Presumably it’s to build suspense for those who haven’t figured this all out yet. But maybe it’s because there’s something even more horrific in the works — like, maybe she’s wearing the bloody, severed face of her mugger-turned-firearms-supplier as a hat.

Mary Worth, 4/2/10

Meanwhile, Mary, having been unwillingly pushed to the peripheries of the great Wilbur-Kurt-Dawn sandwich/frolic-off, is making sure to cement her place in this new storyline from the get-go. “Oh, your husband’s a terrible lout, is he? If you ever need a sympathetic ear, I’m here for you … listening … nodding thoughtfully … drinking your pain, your darkest emotional pain, like the sweet, sweet divine nectar that it is … oh, God, tell me, tell me, TELL ME…”

I also like the way Mary is somewhat ostentatiously gesturing towards the calendar in the first panel. It’s as if she’s saying, “Look at this, bitches, it’s 2010 and I’m still being published! So long as there are nursing homes that subscribe to newspaper print editions as a courtesy to their residents, I will live on!”

Mark Trail, 4/2/10

Good lord, is there no end to the Parker Brothers’ depravity? Even Ma Parker seems unsettled by whatever “processing” they have in mind for their captured geese; presumably they’ll be using the wood chipper to convert them into goose slurry, which they’ll attempt to pass off as foie gras at Senator Sinister’s restaurant, TGI McPoachers. These foul ruffians are so far beyond the limits of decency that the blue-shirted one (Joe? Moe? Jake? Snake? Who can keep the names straight?) probably began his sentence in the third panel with some kind of terrible curse word, which the upstanding narration box thoughtfully blocked for us with a well-placed “Meanwhile.”

While the goose-netting longhairs are obviously this piece’s villains, I think it’s notable that Mark is just taking pictures of the captured birds rather than attempting to free them. This is because geese are well known to be the meanest birds alive; Mark might be willing to take on an shotgun-toting rustic armed with nothing but a Holga, but even he knows better than to unleash a flock of angry geese.

Garfield, 4/2/10

Speaking of well-placed text, Garfield’s third-panel thought balloon allows today’s strip to neatly sidestep a key problem with the gag: Wouldn’t Garfield need to cross out the apostrophe as well to make the joke work? And if so, how would he do it? Doesn’t a crossed-out apostrophe just look like a messy apostrophe? Kudos to Paws, Inc., for their quick thinking!

Blondie, 4/2/10

On Good Friday, Dagwood makes the risen Christ weep with his horrifying rabbit fursuit. 85 percent of the people in the “furfans” and “Blondie fans” Venn diagram overlap are now writing clarifying letters to King Features, emphasizing that Dagwood was not the character they wanted to see dressed in a sexy bunny outfit.

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Beetle Bailey, 4/1/10

It’s frankly time to confront the crucial question that I’ve been avoiding for the entire history of this blog, namely: What kind of terrifying man-beast is Beetle Bailey’s Cookie? At first glance, his character design may appear to be nothing more than “Sarge in a chef’s outfit”; thus, it would seem advisable to keep the two characters from sharing panel space so as to not call attention to this fact, but remorseless narrative logic impels Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC to create scenarios in which notorious binger Sarge heads down to Cookie’s mess hall, for food. Anyway, seeing the two of them together leads one to contemplate the differences between them, the primary one being the hair. Specifically, the … shoulder hair? I’m a pretty hairy dude, I’m not going to lie to you, but last I checked I didn’t have two big tufts of, ugh, flesh-colored hair concentrated on my shoulders, up there at the top of my otherwise smooth, hairless arms. Nobody does, in fact, because that’s not generally how hair grows on humans, which brings us back to our initial question about Cookie, who is some kind of horrible abomination, gross, and thanks, Walker-Browne AHI LLC, for writing a gag that literally forces us to contemplate this freak’s body hair, and the places where it does and does not grow.

And what about his ears? His bizarrely plump ears? Eaaaaauuurrghhh.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/1/10

Naturally, there is only so much room for happiness in the soul-crushing Funkyverse, which means that anyone’s even modest triumph must displace the proud achievements of others in a terrible zero-sum game. The supply of misery, of course, is infinite.

Dennis the Menace, 4/1/10

In a particularly non-menacing display, Dennis plays on April Fools’ Days joke on Mr. Wilson that involves not vandalizing his car. Those brake lines better be cut, kid.