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Mary Worth, 1/11/10

You’d think that after, what, five and a half years of analyzing this nonsense “professionally,” my capacity to be amused and delighted by the total inability of Mary Worth characters to speak the way that the humans do would have slowly been dulled. But you would be mistaken, as nothing in today’s comics got as big a laugh out of me as “I suffer from an uneasy restlessness” did. It might actually seem here that scruffy neo-hobo Kurt is going to offer a radical alternative to this strip’s suffocating bourgeois values, and will lure Wilbur away from his comfortable condo life towards a new less stable and more vital existence, traveling from town to town to see what experiences the world has in store. But Kurt came into Wilbur’s life via the Internet, and everything associated with the Internet in Mary Worth is bad, so clearly this storyline will end with that sort of disaster averted and Wilbur returned safely to his ordinary soul-numbing life.

More proof that Kurt and Wilbur may actually be related by blood: their shared impulse to wear jackets and hats of precisely the same hue.

Jumble, 1/11/10

Speaking of suffocating bourgeois values, there’s something quite poignant about today’s Jumble, in which a group of crazed shoppers respond to a half-off sale on sodium-laden processed semi-food with a level of frenzy usually reserved for the Beatles circa 1964. I’m particularly saddened by the dude in the background, who’s cheerfully running over to the freezer case to make sure that he can bring home as many trays of microwaveable goop as possible, unaware of his life’s essential emptiness.

Crock, 1/11/10

I have many gripes against the creative team behind Crock, but one particular unlikable aspect of the strip as I encounter it is beyond their control: the fact that the desert setting is routinely slathered with a neon yellow unlike any found in nature must be blamed on the post-production colorists, not the credited artists. Still, it’s distracting, as in today’s strip, where it appears that Kerwood is being worked to death in some kind of sand mine.

Marvin, 1/11/10

For decades scientists have wondered: Would it be possible to create a character less appealing than Marvin? Well, the creators of this long running crime against humanity strip have decided to take that challenge head-on, by creating a Tyler Durden-style alternate personality for the titular hell-infant that encapsulates all of his worst qualities. The horrible little pig-faced monster is wearing his hat backwards for no good reason, which I suppose is a start.

Ziggy, 1/11/10

Thanks to a challenge from Stephan Pastis, Ziggy briefly experimented late last year with putting pants on its title character. That experiment has now thankfully been abandoned, but today we can see why Ziggy usually eschews trousers, as even a few weeks of wearing them has horribly mangled his legs. Are his feet pointing backwards?

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Beetle Bailey, 1/10/10

Any catalog of complaints from General Halftrack’s various body parts that does not include a plea for a mercy killing from his much-abused liver is a joke and a fraud. One can only assume that the poor organ is wholly comatose at this point, or that it possibly expired in blessed relief years ago.

Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/10/10

With today’s throwaway panels, it appears that Snuffy Smith is moving away from retreaded hillbilly humor and towards an interesting new creative avenue: providing absurdly elaborate but almost realistic replies to the set-ups of classic vaudeville-era jokes. “This guy on the street told me he hadn’t had a bite in weeks … so I said ‘You might want to check out this new fish place on 33rd Street, the halibut is to die for!” “Take my wife … to that Philip Glass retrospective! It’s not my thing, but I think she’d really enjoy it!”

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Pluggers, 1/9/10

My wife has a theory that purse-snatchers should really focus their attention on men who have been forced by their significant other to hold onto said lady-friend’s purse for a few minutes, since they invariably treat it as if it were full of highly radioactive material, attempting to make as little physical contact with the purse as possible and holding it at arm’s length. Our gender-terrified plugger would make an easy mark for such a thief, as it looks as if he’d much rather lose some cash and spend and afternoon calling all his family’s various credit card companies than even briefly being mistaken for, I don’t know, a drag queen or something (OH AS IF HONEY).

Marmaduke, 1/9/10

I have always assumed that the thoughts running through Marmaduke’s head make up an unimaginable melange of nightmare and carnage that would drive any normal mind insane just to contemplate it for an instant; thus, I’m shocked that even Phil Hitler dares to ask the hell-beast’s opinion on matters sexual. Good luck with your rapid descent into madness, Phil!