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Mary Worth, 7/10/09

Bless you, Charley Smith! Bless your stripey shirt and your $11 haircut and your transparent attempt to work your way into Delilah’s insane pants! Bless you for showing us a side of Mary Worth that we’ve never seen before — something bordering on flustered panic, as she sees her meddlee slipping out of her grasp and, in desperation, physically drags her to safety. I love the fact that Mary is continuing with the verbal niceties of a normal, polite conversation, despite the fact that she’s practically breaking her poor boarder’s wrist in a desperate attempt to save her from her own horny misjudgment. I’m pretty sure in the final panel she’s on the verge grabbing Charley’s phone number away from Delilah with her teeth and eating it to prevent the two of them from ever communicating again.

Gil Thorp, 7/10/09

This, on the other hand, I do not care for. You want Gil to coach baseball? Don’t you remember how boring that was during actual baseball season? The whole point of the summer storylines are to get away from that sort of thing. I suppose it might be acceptable if Gil is put in charge of a team of impoverished, ill-mannered youths with sassy mouths, and if an embittered Shep Trumbo comes to games dressed as a hobo just to harass them.

Apartment 3-G, 7/10/09

Even with all the Tibet-themed madness that’s been going on in this strip for months, if you had asked me what celebrity would make a special guest appearance in Apartment 3-G, the Dalai Lama would not have been my first guess. I don’t buy his claim that his English not so good — he’s deploying a semicolon, after all, which is at least an intermediate-level move. No, I think that the real reason for his quick exit is that’s he’s afraid to share narrative space with Margo, and with good reason. I imagine that the powerful combination of arousal and terror that anyone would feel in her presence would make it very difficult to maintain a Buddhist sense of non-attachment.

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Gil Thorp, 7/9/09

Despite my many gripes about it, I genuinely, unironically enjoy Gil Thorp for any number or reasons, one of which is its tendency to bring back beloved characters from deranged storylines past. Today’s returning guest star is the wonderful Ted Pearse, first discovered in the ghetto of Milford in late 2005 teaching the kids straight-up streetball, which it turned out he was well acquainted with because he lived on those very streets, as a homeless person, which caused the Mudlarks’ rival schools’ fans to taunt him by dressing up as hobos at games. Anyway, it now appears that he’s gotten a haircut and moved up in the world, to the extent that he can make Gil’s eyes go wide with the prospect of gainful employment. Perhaps Ted has graduated from Oliver Twist to Fagin, and Gil will be forced to spend the summer picking pockets and running petty scams to earn his daily bowlful of gruel.

Judge Parker, 7/9/09

Speaking of beloved characters from the past, did you know that global warming prophet/awesome cheerleader Sophie has a hotter, older sister named Neddy? You wouldn’t if you’ve only started reading Judge Parker in the last two years! Neddy has been studying art in Paris for all that time, living in a fab French apartment that Abbey bought for her from one of Neddy’s bio-relatives on a whim for a seven-figure sum (don’t ask). Now she’s returning … and with a friend! This makes Sam look concerned, because he hates people and is suspicious of your so-called “friendship.” Who will this mysterious friend be? If we’re lucky, it will be Cedric, who was working as a temp butler in said Paris apartment when Abbey and Neddy arrived (DON’T ASK); Cedric is handy with a gun and had a 21-year-old wife who was jealously stalking Neddy because of his admitted thing for teenage girls. If we’re really lucky, it will be this charming sociology grad student/hooker.

Mary Worth, 7/9/09

Mary Worth, in contrast, exists in an eternal, timeless present. The current storyline happens, and is all that ever happens, and when it ends the guest stars are hustled off into the grey mists that hover at edge of Santa Royale. While some, like Aldo, are literally killed, others, like Chester the dog, and Von and Vera, and Ron the city councilstud, and what’s-their-name, the couple where the husband kept trying to keep his wife plump, simply vanish, never to be heard from or thought about again, while new victims are drawn out from the same ether that surrounds Mary’s reality. Are we honestly expected to believe that Delilah and Charlie are real people who existed before they walked on stage this month, despite the fact that those of us who’ve been reading the strip for nearly seven years now have never once heard of them? Poppycock. There are certain themes, certain moments of eternal return that do recur, however. We know, for instance, that deep beneath Mary’s helpful facade is a terrible rage waiting to be unleashed, and that, when you see the anger lines radiating from her as we do here, an awful vengeance is brewing. Mary, stuck in her timeless world, may not even know what she’s capable of, but we know. We know, and we wait with eager anticipation.

(Speaking of things that we faithful readers remember, those with fond memories of Aldomania may enjoy today’s Something Positive strip, though be warned that after viewing it you’ll never be quite right again.)

Crankshaft, 7/9/09

In other news, Crankshaft is using his summer job as an ice cream truck driver as an excuse to follow scantily clad young women around while furtively masturbating.

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Zits, 7/8/09

True story: I got braces at the age of twelve, and for the first few days the experience was so painful and disorienting that I couldn’t really eat anything more solid than well-boiled pasta. This is almost certainly typical, but nobody had really warned me about it in advance, so it sort of freaked me out, and I began to worry that I’d be spending the next two years eating things that didn’t require much chewing; thus, before my mother returned from work one evening, I staged my suicide in protest. It wasn’t a particularly elaborate simulation — a florid “Good bye, cruel world that I can no longer masticate properly” note and me sprawled dramatically on the couch — and my mom’s first reaction was laughter, which means either it was wholly unconvincing or other things I don’t care to think about.

Anyway, this is my way of saying that I may be biased here, but I don’t think Dennis is telling some hilarious anecdote in panel one. The way he’s pointing at his metal-caged mouth is particularly troubling to me, and I imagine he’s actually saying “I think you made it too tight! Oh, God, the pain is unbearable!” But, accustomed to having his feelings on the matter ignored, he just slouches off with a resigned “schormz,” knowing that the discomfort will subside just in time for his next appointment, when the cycle begins again.

Family Circus, 7/8/09

Wait, a vegetarian … and all that shaggy hair … my God, have the Keanes allowed a dirty hippie into their home? The animal cracker bit may indicate that his mind has been reduced to pudding by the demon reefer, but more likely he’s just making a joke (which is also entirely unacceptable in polite company, because it confuses the children). I also suspect that if he heard Jeffy referring to him as “Mr. Coverly” he’d say “Hey, call me Jack, little guy! My dad is Mr. Coverly.” Anyway, why would our family of upstanding patriots allow this sort of person to sit in their living room and eat their generic potato chips? I suspect that he’s a new neighbor, and the clan patriarch is giving him one last chance to renounce his hateful philosophy and get a job that requires a tie; failing that, his long-haired head will be put on a spike on the Keane Kompound’s walls, as a warning to others.

Beetle Bailey, 7/8/09

I was going to make a crack about illegal use of a work-related credit card here, but on the scale of corrupt Defense Department spending, this is probably as low as it gets, even if Beetle and Miss Buxley are eating at an establishment that makes waiters wear tuxedos to serve soup. Anyway, I’m guessing she’s paying because she thinks that this way he’ll have to put out. Good luck with that, sweetie!