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Garfield, 7/18/09

Some years back, some friends of mine got married at a little camp they had rented in lovely Big Island, Virginia, in the rural foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. After the reception, they headed over to a nearby bed and breakfast, while most of the guests crashed overnight at the camp; the next day, the happy couple came back to the camp to have lunch with us, with a tale to tell. Apparently, there was one other couple also spending their wedding night at the bed and breakfast that night, and at breakfast the next morning, they looked like they were in more or less a state of shock — as my friend put it, they appeared to have experienced “a night full of terrible discoveries.” That’s what popped into my mind here when I saw John and Liz’s traumatized faces. Have they crossed some line, gone someplace from which they can never return? Will they ever be the same again? Was there a lot of tongue involved?

I’m amused, meanwhile, that Garfield feels a need to euphemize a disgust-prompted quantum of vomit as a “hairball.” Perhaps Paws, Inc., believes that the newspaper comics morals police would accept a reference to the sort of regurgitation natural to the cat lifestyle, whereas straight-up barfing would be forbidden. Clearly, they hadn’t seen this.

Mary Worth, 7/18/09

Speaking of people who have just experienced a night of terrible discoveries, check out Mary and Delilah’s devastated facial expressions here. You’ll have noticed that, while I breathlessly kept you up to date two weeks ago on every aspect of the interaction between Mary, Delilah, and Charley, I have been silent in the aftermath; that’s because the aftermath was boring, consisting of Mary and Delilah having the same pointless conversation, about how Delilah should get back together with her husband and Delilah saying she’d like to but she’s not sure, that they had for like three solid weeks leading up to the wonderful Charley episode. Mary is now washing her dishes with a look of defeated resignation on her face, her meddling having apparently failed to break through Delilah’s thick skull. Delilah, meanwhile, has chosen to wander unescorted around Charterstone in her revealing outfit, which will surely result in Charley leaping out of the bushes and wooing her with more transparent sleazy banter. Thus are the punishments the gods dish out to those who ignore Mary’s sound advice.

Gil Thorp, 7/18/09

Meanwhile, in Gil Thorp: The Stalkening, it appears we just might have a worthily bonkers summer storyline. WHO could hurling these baseballs at Gil and/or leaving them in his mailbox, since Shep Trumbo is “on vacation” (i.e., in prison for loosening the caps of all those saltshakers)? Who has Gil wronged in a baseball-themed manner, leading him to lurk in the shadows, wearing a Phantom of the Opera-style half-mask, cackling evilly and plotting revenge? Could it be Elmer Vargas, now condemned to work for the Kalamazoo Kings for all time? Clambake, whose dreams of baseball coaching glory were forever ruined by his ugly season with the Mudlarks? Everyone who’s played on the baseball team for the past six years and failed to go anywhere in the playdowns?

Mark Trail, 7/18/09

I’ve never had anyone assassinated by a sniper right in front of me, but I’m willing to bet the resulting noise would really be more like a BLAM or a KA-POW or a neeeeerrrMMP than a WHAM. However, the more important question is: what sound effects will the bullets make as they are punched out of the air one by one by Mark, as he slowly and deliberately makes his way back to confront our sinister villain?

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Spider-Man, 7/17/09

God bless the newspaper Spider-Man strip; it’s more powerful than even I could have imagined. Its ability to suck the drama and excitement out of any storyline it touches and replace it with its own imperatives — cheesy jokes, endless domestic scenes, and totally pointless, neurotic fretting about the revealing of secret identities — is truly impressive. So overwhelming is this anti-dramatic forcefield that here we have Marvel Entertainment, Inc. uber-badass Wolverine sitting with Peter and MJ at some terrible no-star restaurant and making his first-ever friends.

I seem to recall a bit in the first X-Men movie where Wolverine admitted, in an emo but manly way, that every time his claws popped out, it was painful, so naturally he’s using them here to manipulate the brown globby food slabs that he’s ordered. Look at MJ, Logan! You should cut your slabs up into blobs and eat them with a shrimp fork.

Ziggy, 7/17/09

You might think that the joke here is that a toaster is not, in fact, fun for the whole family, and thus the sign is deeply misguided. But it goes deeper: Since Ziggy has no family, and nobody loves him or ever has, he has no context for what might constitute family fun. Thus, he stares at the window display, expressionless. Is this the sort of device that families use, to enjoy themselves? He may buy it just to find out; when it fails to alleviate his soul-rending lonliness, he’ll just take it into the bathtub in an attempt to end it all that will end up failing, furthering his humiliation.

Marvin, 7/17/09

Ha ha, Marvin is going to be pecked to death, by seagulls! I take back everything bad I ever said about birds.

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Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois, 7/16/09

Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois may share the same offices over at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC (in a low-slung business park, just off the interstate), but that doesn’t mean that they march in creative lockstep! That’s particularly clear today. Beetle Bailey uses Otto, the strip’s most intelligent and self-reflective character, to contemplate serious philosophical questions. Since he’s a dog, one could say that he was put into this world to bark; yet, like so many of us, he suffers a crisis of identity, a belief that even the actions that reflect his innermost nature are ultimately unrewarding and unrewarded. One is reminded of Arjuna expressing his doubts in the Bhagavad Gita, before going into battle; however, whereas Arjuna had Krishna to explain to him the spiritual importance of fulfilling one’s dharma, or duty, Otto has no teacher or framework to show him the essential value of barking. In this way he is like us, who toil away in alienated post-capitalism, unsure of the larger connection between what we do and the world we would like ideally to help build.

Hi and Lois, meanwhile, takes a different tack. Did you know that vomiting is funny, and that babies are prone to vomiting? The first panel is a little crude artistically, but seeing as it’s probably the first point-of-view depiction in a nationally syndicated comic strip of what it’s like to have someone puke into your face, we should probably cut it a little slack.

Phantom, 7/16/09

Oh, hey, what’s going on over in the Phantom, where we’re being shown how the first two lady Jungle Patrolpersons are fitting in to this elite paramilitary unit? Well, the lady cop patrolhuman has been enlisted for her helicoptering skills, and has picked up the Unknown Commander from an urban location, from whence he had unceremoniously nabbed a suspect out of his own home. Now she’s dropped them off in an isolated rural area, where, without any wimpy liberal niceties like a trial, he will presumably be viciously attacked by a wolf or just shot in the back of the head. And our heroine’s main goal throughout has been to get a look at this human rights abuser’s handsome face. Ha ha, women, am I right, people?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/16/09

Hey, remember how the new Rex Morgan, M.D., plot was going to be some sexy story about adultery? In classic bait-and-switch fashion, it turns out that the promise of extramarital relations and the drama they cause was just to lure you into reading about something much more important, and depressing, namely the poor care that people with Alzheimer’s receive. Becka has been shocked — shocked! — to find that a private clinic is interested in cutting costs, even if that means lowering the quality of medical attention given to its paying customers! As we learn in today’s strips, the clinic’s revenue-generating ideas push the boundaries of medical ethics: they’ve set up an “Alzheimer’s enclosure” at the zoo, near the primate house, where members of the public can buy tickets to come and gawk.