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Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/7/08

A while back, I wondered what sort of medical drama the Morgans would be dealing with on their high seas cruise adventure. But June’s surly deckhand encounter, combined with all the hijinks on display here, indicate that this death ship is afflicted not by Legionnaires’ disease or rampant crabs, but by one of those Star Trek-style diseases that alter people’s personality in comically overdetermined ways. In this case, it seems to have transformed all of the ship’s male crewmembers into assholes, and reduced the women to crying, traumatized wrecks.

The real danger is that if Rex is infected, it will be difficult to tell. But no matter what danger our heroes face, they’ll be sure to triumph with Sarah in their corner, as she seems to have been replaced in panel three with Filipino martial arts star/viral video phenom Weng Weng.

Mary Worth, 12/7/08

“Hmm, my daughter fainted on-ice after years of my browbeating her as her skating coach, no doubt because she’s grown to hate the sport and how it’s destroyed our relationship, and now she won’t talk to me … what could I possibly do to cheer her up and re-establish an emotional connection? I know! I’ll decorate her hospital room with figure-skating posters!”

Savor that last panel, everybody, as Lynn’s dramatic ellipses represents the last moment when you’ll still believe that the story behind this mysterious photo might be interesting.

Shoe, 12/7/08

The Replacements broke up in 1991, so we now know that, by 2036 at the latest, we will all be transformed into horrible hybrid human-bird things. God help us all.

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Gil Thorp, 12/7/08

Say what you will about Gil Thorp — that it’s confusing and irritating, that its relationship to actual teenage athletics is tenuous at best, that its rapidly shifting narrative and visual perspectives can induce nausea and seizures — but at least it’s unpredictable! By this, I mean that the storylines often seem to point to one obvious and lame denouement, then suddenly zig in another direction that’s equally unsatisfying but has the added benefit of also not making sense in terms of what came before. Thus, for a while we’ve been set up to have the ’Czak foisted onto Prep Spotlight Live From Marty Moon’s Basement as the dotty Kelly Ripa to Marty’s exasperated, avuncular Regis; however, it’s now clear that the 6′ 9″ heart attack waiting to happen will be cohosting the show with his best pal Matt the Hat, with Marty nowhere to be seen. Presumably he’s tied up in the back room, watching in horror as these two clowns wear stupid clothes and flash up phony gang signs; or perhaps his TV overlords simply gave him his “severance package” (i.e., a case of discount gin) and shoved him in the general direction of his car.

Gasoline Alley, 12/6/08

When I think about Gasoline Alley at all, my thoughts are usually driven by my unreasoning entirely reasonable hatred of Slim, so I was annoyed to see that he’d be the focus of the Christmas-themed storyline. But now that I see that said storyline will involve him being urinated on, I’m beginning to rethink my opinions on the matter.

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Ziggy, 12/5/08

OK, a confession to get out of the way right off the bat: I laughed, more or less involuntarily, at today’s Ziggy. There, I said it. Not being accustomed to such a reaction, I lingered over the panel for a bit and noticed that “such as it is” on the punchline-sign is in a very different style of handwriting than the text above it — it’s scrawled in a slapdash fashion. Is this mean to indicate that “THIS IS YOUR PARK” is an official notice from Ziggy’s municipality, but “such as it is” is meant to be a graffito of some sort? If so, this reduces the humor content of the strip considerably, as insulting and/or aggressive placards issued by some faceless authority are about the only recurring element in Ziggy that I find tolerable. But then I thought up another scenario: what if the space below “THIS IS YOUR PARK” had originally been left blank by the strip’s artist, who couldn’t think of the right joke put in there, and then he went on some kind of day-long drinking binge, and stumbled back to his drawing board, and at last had an epiphany that yes, “such as it is” was perfect, it would even make the Comics Curmudgeon laugh, that smug asshole, what does he know? And sure, what with the booze the writing came out kind of wonky, but it was true, it did make the Comics Curmudgeon laugh, huzzah! Huzzah for alcohol!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/5/08

Snuffy has bludgeoned one of his many rivals in the lucrative Hootin’ Holler meth trade to death with a frozen chicken. As in the Roald Dahl short story “Lamb to the Slaughter,” he disposes of the gruesome evidence by cooking it up for dinner. However, whereas Dahl’s story traffics in simple irony (the murder weapon is fed to the police investigating the crime), Barney Google and Snuffy Smith goes deeper (not that you would expect anything less): the killer chicken is fed to the local man of God, who is moreover told after the fact of his complicity in the terrible crime. How will the parson keep preaching the good word from the pulpit, knowing the atrocities that he’s participated in?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/5/08

Who’s up for another several weeks of June Morgan being sexily cruel to the help? [Raises hand] Me! Me! I am!

Pluggers, 12/5/08

Pluggers will make up a lot of crazy nonsense sayings to justify the fact that they’re generally too hung over to get to work on time.