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Mary Worth, 10/13/08

Well, Toby Cameron’s Big Identity Theft Adventure, having been beaten to death with a bludgeon of love and understanding and openness, has finally gasped its last; today, without even the foreplay of a Charterstone Pool Party, we’re thrust rudely into our next storyline, which is: Mary and Jeff watch TV. Taste the thrills! Who do these people think they are, characters in Spider-Man?

Anyway, it’s hard to predict where a Mary Worth storyline is going to go based on its opening moments — who could have foreseen that an innocent lunch with Mary would have led Toby down the road to credit card fraud and shameful kilt-porn purchases? — but based on today’s strip I’m hoping that we’ll get back to my favorite theme in this strip, which is the humiliation of Dr. Jeff. “Frank Griffin? I haven’t seen him in ages, since that time I refused to let him get past second base! But that was before I realized that he was a famous person, on TV. Hmmm, if I make good time I could be at the skating competition in less than two hours … Jeff, don’t wait up, dear.”

Curtis, 10/13/08

Key questions about today’s Curtis:

• Why is Curtis, whose main interest in Christianity seems to be in the outrageousness of the hats worn by the ladies at the church he attends, so excited about a book of Old Testament lore?
• Why is Curtis, who is old enough to be a seething cauldron of lust-hormones, so excited about finding a children’s book?
• Could there possibly have been an even more awkward way to introduce the concept of Noah’s Ark into this conversation?
• What kind of pagan terrorist Lord of the Rings-based religion do they practice on Flyspeck Island, and why haven’t we clamped down on immigration from this breeding ground for un-American weirdos?
• Did Curtis’s ass sigh in the final panel? Seriously?

Spider-Man, 10/13/08

Yes, that’s right, Jonah — Maria, who is a successful and attractive television personality, can’t afford her own food, so obviously the only way she can avoid starvation is to accept dinner invitations from irritating blowhards with terrible haircuts and Hitler mustaches. And of course, if you’re so desperately famished that what you want is a free meal with which you can gorge yourself as quickly as possible, what you’re going to order is the lobster.

The sad thing is that this is by far the most interesting of the current Spider-Man storylines.

Blondie, 10/13/08

This wouldn’t be such a big deal if not for the fact that this is the only outfit that Dagwood owns.

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Slylock Fox, 10/12/08

This here in a nutshell is why my growing affection for Reeky Rat doesn’t translate into respect for his fellow small-mammal small-time crook, Shady Shrew. When caught in his acts of petty theft, Reeky adopts an air of sneering bravado, spinning alibis so outrageous that he’s almost daring you to throw him in jail. Shady, on the other, just seems pathetic, his attempts at pinning his pointless crimes (stealing tires off a police car?) on others just coming across as increasingly desperate improvisations. In addition, Reeky has an inimitable sense of style, while Shady favors the baggy, shapeless uniform of furtive perverts everywhere.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/12/08

Never has this strip come closer to really acknowledging its transformation from light-hearted high school romp to depressing trudge towards inevitable death. “I miss the days when everything ahead was bright and shining … instead of foggy, and grey, and full of tumors.”

Judge Parker, 10/12/08

You read it here first, everybody: THE DOG DID IT. That creepy little critter stole the rifle and took its revenge on the man who dumped the owner she adores. She’s smiling at you because she knows you’ll never figure it out, Sam.

I’m glad to see that the Phoenix police department has loosened its dress code enough so that black leather pants are OK for homicide detectives to wear on the job.

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Gil Thorp, 10/11/08

The only Marty Moon strips I like better than the ones where he passes out drunk in his car are the ones where he’s proven ragingly incompetent at his job. Surely a reporter with years of experience covering high school sports shouldn’t get rattled by some seventeen-year-old’s idea of being a difficult interview, even if he is 6′ 9″? (I note the latter fact because this may be the first strip in weeks in which Jeff Ponczak has appeared and nobody’s mentioned his height.) Anyway, Jeff has made a terrible enemy of Marty Moon, for making him look bad on his crappy public access show that nine people watch! Marty’s vengeance against his many nemeses — Cully Vale, Gil Thorp, that Ben Franklin lookalike golf hustler guy — has generally either backfired hilariously or just gone unnoticed by its intended targets, so hopefully we are in for some wacky hijinks.

Dick Tracy, 10/11/08

The current Dick Tracy plot, involving impractical robots on opposite sides of the law, will be painfully boring until the robots fight, and maybe even then, but today’s strip deserves commentary for two points. One, I am spending way too much mental energy wondering why Dick Tracy’s robot speaks in some kind of vowel-poor version of l33t-speak but the bad guy’s robot doesn’t; and two, “Elsewhere” is possibly the most minimalist and least informative change-of-scene narration box ever deployed in comics, even beating out “In another room.”

Archie, 10/11/08

Is anyone else hypnotized and unsettled by Jughead’s shirt, which offers no explanation as to who or what it’s promoting with its enormous letter “S”? Is it meant to frustrate and ultimately educate the bourgeoisie, who naively expect written text to transmit information of some kind? That explanation would seem to fit in with Jughead’s unexplained transformation from a shiftless high school student to an avant-garde photographer with a major gallery show.

Beetle Bailey, 10/11/08

OK, we get it, Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Enterprises LLC! There’s nothing in this world you love more than golf. If you had to choose between golf and your family and friends, you’d choose golf without hesitation, since if you show up at the course by yourself they’ll assign you to a foursome, so you technically don’t need them. In fact, as today’s strip shows, you love it so much that you’d rather announce that fact than, say, coming up with one of the seven weekly jokes that basically make up your job.