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Mary Worth, 2/7/10

Uh oh — it looks like Dawn isn’t going to sit back just acquiesce to losing her father’s affections to some scam artist! It seems that she is going to try shock therapy by finding the one person who can be guaranteed to terrify Wilbur back to his senses: erstwhile romantic rival Martin Clark. Sure, he’s been dead for years, but that will make the ultimate confrontation all the more harrowing, as Dawn rigs up the rich man’s corpse to move and speak like a marionette. “Look at me, Wilbur!” Martin will say, thanks to the ventriloquist lessons Dawn’s been taking on the sly. “I’m a charred, reassembled cadaver, and yet Abby would still choose me over you!”

Blondie, 2/7/10

This right here is seven panels of Superbowl Sunday inanity punctuated by one glorious moment of complete madness. I suppose that longtime readers of Blondie are supposed to know that spinning around on one’s head is an indicator of extreme, uncontrollable emotion of some kind, but to the casual viewer, it would just appear that Dagwood, Herb, and Daisy have chosen to express their football-related outrage with a stunning display of eerily synchronized breakdancing. Which I for one am totally in favor of.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/7/10

You know who I just realized that I totally don’t get at all? Berna! She’s Rex and June’s receptionist and she runs a successful salon of some sort and she uses Yugoslav generalissimo Tito’s recipes to dominate the local restaurant scene? Why would such a power broker need a relatively menial job behind a clinic’s front desk? Perhaps she uses it to drum up business for her salon. “Honey, trust me, Western medicine can’t do a thing about those split ends. Here’s my number.”

Meanwhile, I look forward to seeing how this strip attempts to make a guy named “Toots” who has a stripey rugby shirt, a goofy little beard, and a lot of hair gel into some kind of threat against Rex and June’s carefully constructed bourgeois order.

Marvin, 2/7/10

Since we only get a single glimpse of Marvin’s dad in this strip, in which he appears to be a good 15 or 20 feet away from his terrible little son and not getting any closer, I’m guessing this is less “father/son bonding” and more “let’s bring the hateful monster outside and leave him there until he ‘accidentally’ freezes to death.”

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Mark Trail, 2/6/10

I may have missed this earlier, but it appears that the hilariously surnamed Parker brothers are hilariously named Moe and Joe. What whimsical parents they must have had, to give them rhyming names! Clearly the only way they had to rebel against their twee upbringing was to grow facial hair and generally dick it up out on the lake, with their big motors. Still, we can see a bit of their wacky heritage out on display in the rapid-fire shirt exchange they made between panels one and two, just for absurdist fun. Mark and Senator Hatcher just stand there with their hands manfully on their hips, their low-key masculinity offering a counterpoint to their desperate antics

In panel three, Joe, or possibly Moe, shows that he’s well acquainted with the most up-to-date way to effect political change, which is to buttonhole one of your elected officials and scream at him.

For Better For Worse, 2/6/10

FBOFW reruns are like comics methadone: not as good as the real thing, and yet I still can’t seem to taper off. I do enjoy them for their sociological insight into late ’70s/early ’80s Canada, anyway. Today we learn what the main characteristic of a dark, seedy Montreal jazz club of the era was: omnipresent menacing mustaches.

Marmaduke, 2/6/10

Come now, Marmaduke’s lovingly curated collection of human femurs is a work of art, not a mere job. I mean, I at least hope that nobody’s paying him for it.

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Apartment 3-G, 2/5/10

OK, you guys, are you ready for a theory that will blow your mind? Huh? Are you?

Before I launch into said theory let me, for the benefit of relative newcomers, recap the Story of Margo. Margo was raised by her wealthy father Martin and his wife — who, it turns out, was not her mother. Her mother is Gabriella, a lowly maid, who Martin knocked up. When Margo found out this sordid tale as an adult, it wreaked havoc with her family life and ability to feel ordinary human emotions, obviously, and she seems deeply suspicious that her parents are palling around again.

And what about Martin’s wife, the one who, presumably, Margo thought of as her mother for most of her childhood, but who probably viewed Margo with some combination of horror and disgust? Well, we don’t really know much about her, other than her name, which is … Roberta.

What’s a common nickname for Roberta? Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Or, really, more specifically, are you thinking what the folks over at the Lovely Ladies of Apartment 3-G blog are thinking, who had the idea first? Is the cheating husband Bobbie is obsessively chasing Martin? Is that building across the street Gabriella’s? Is this glorious lunatic pill-popping shrink-screwing floozy the woman whose disdain and resentment shaped Margo into the woman she is today? Will this plotline end in a fantabulous one-on-one Bobbie-Margo battle that will result in the two of them resolving their differences and teaming up to destroy anyone in their way? I am giddy!

(And if you aren’t reading the Lovely Ladies of Apartment 3-G, well, why the heck not?)

Pluggers, 2/5/10

Pluggers pretty much go through life in a prescription med haze, so why shouldn’t their pets, too? It sure would keep the damn things from barking constantly and cutting into pluggers’ valuable staring-at-the-wall-and-drooling time! Plus, giving pills to animals is the sort of thing that seems hilarious when you’re high.

Beetle Bailey, 2/5/10

Meanwhile, the poor vendor who owns that cart is lying on some city sidewalk bleeding to death from a bayonet wound to the gut. But, whatever, that Sarge sure likes to eat, amiright?