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Mary Worth and Judge Parker, 10/8/07

“Sure, why not” vs. “You think?”: The sassy young ladies of the soap opera strips come up with the closest things to snappy comebacks allowed in this genre. Dawn has bizarrely chosen to encapsulate her sass as some kind of bit of quoted wisdom. My question: is this some flip statement that Drew made once, long ago, that Dawn memorized like every other sentence he uttered in her presence? Or is it just another in the long line of Mary Worth things-presented-as-quotes-that-aren’t-actually-quotes? A trip through the archives would answer this question, but I don’t have the spiritual strength for it this afternoon. I will say this, though: Dawn’s tremulous tear in panel one is actually better drawn than the single droplet usually seen on the faces of the various girls in Apartment 3-G.

Meanwhile, Judger Parker’s Sophie has come up with the only appropriate response to Rusty’s increasingly desperate bids to bend Sam to her legal will. Unable or unwilling to recognize her old classmate’s total disinterest in her assets, she’ll be humping the place settings before she’s through. Sophie’s droll reaction indicates that she knows well enough why Sam and Abbey expanded their family by adopting a pair of homeless millionaire adolescents rather than via the more conventional route.

By the way, does anyone know how old exactly Sophie is supposed to be? Is she ten, or forty and suffering from some kind of glandular condition? Her little lilac pantsuit is kind of freaking me out.

Dick Tracy, 10/8/07

Calling the heads in Dick Tracy “enormous and terrifying” isn’t exactly breaking new ground, but — God damn, those heads in panel two are enormous and terrifying. They sort of remind me of characters from video games in the mid-90s — two-dimensional drawings wrapped freakishly around some overly simplistic polyhedron. Anyway, the face on the front of the slightly smaller and less terrifying head in panel two looks glum, and why shouldn’t it? Dopey Dmitri and now-exploded Gretchen get all the credit in Dick’s exposition, but what about him? Doesn’t he at least rate an unimaginative and stereotypical name, like “Ivan” or “Hans”?

Gil Thorp, 10/8/07

Huh, so Cully Vale is a murderer. I’m assuming Gil already knows this — he always seems to be one step ahead of his cretinous students (a talent that sadly doesn’t seem to translate to his coaching, but never mind that for the moment). Since Gil seemed pretty blasé about having his baseball team coached by a fraud, it should come as no surprise that he’s let a cold-blooded killer into his locker room; I would have thought that the strip would have worked up to this with maybe a little light drug dealing first, but heck, why not just go for the gusto right away. I can’t wait for the cops to come question Coach Thorp about all the bodies only to have him reply with a resounding “Eh.”

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Hey everyone, it’s Sunday night, and you know what that means … it means the COMMENT OF THE WEEK!

Curtis: “So how is Diane going to tell Stacey’s mom (who obviously doesn’t have it going on) about this? ‘Oh, by the way, my son was masturbating to a tape of your daughters tits’?” –Krohmdohm

And it also means the very funny runners-up, obviously.

“You know, I would think a place with the name ‘Bum Boat’ would show up in Gil Thorp long before it would in Mary Worth. It’s only natural: every Gil Thorp strip seems like the lead-up to the hardcore scenes in gay porn, whereas every Mary Worth strip seems like the lead-up to solving the mystery in Murder She Wrote. I guess that’s where they’re similar: they both try to string the reader along with a promise of something exciting around the corner but constantly deliver inadvertently humorous situations without giving the reader the goods they expect.” –Forthillrox

“Dick Tracy, it begins to dawn on me, is Wagner for the comics page. The vast dilation of time … the protracted sequential repetition … the ambiguous, perplexing perspectives (so very like the disorienting harmonic confusion of, e.g., Tristan) … the omnipresent fire and death … yeah. It all fits. Today, witness the return of the ‘My Gretchen’ leitmotif, subtly transformed to seem smaller, fainter, more querulous, as if borne through the most poignant tragedy. (‘Poignant’ here is used in the sense of ‘having a considerable splatter radius.’)” –Keg of Curd

“I’m pretty sure this is the first time in recorded history that the phrase ‘the Wall Street Journal’ has concluded with an exclamation point.” –dbp

“The only thing Dick Tracy renders more lovingly than the excruciating torment of criminals is chins. Dick Tracy loves chins. Today we have the beautiful trifecta of Dick’s utterly rectangular chin, the Baron’s respectable jowls, and the elongated majesty of … whoever that is.” –Reynard Noir.

“If this strip has somehow put a subliminal image of death into my head, and that goddamn butler shows up when my time comes, I swear I will come back and sue Batiuk and his heirs from beyond the grave.” –Quäsenbo Pan

“I’ll just add that I’ve never seen a worse waiter than the one in Archie. Two glasses, and he looks like he’s about to topple over. Has Betty’s pantslessness given him a giant erection? Is he slipping on the mess on the floor caused by Betty and Archie’s lovemaking? What I love most is his look of grim determination, as if Betty and Archie have been screwing on the same spot every day for the last month, and Mr. Waiter has up until this moment always avoided their love-jasm. Not today, however. ‘Today,’ thinks the waiter, ‘Today I’m just going to walk through it. Screw them and their love juices. I have a goddamn job to do, and today I’m going to do it, and not by some scenic route, either.’ His customer waits with all the anxious expectation of a sports fan, or just a fan of watching people fall violently backwards.” –RaJ

Mary Worth: “Can we please stop seeing three-hair combover dad pawing his daughter? It’s surpassing creepy and moving into … what comes after creepy? Crawly?” –chumley

“For this Spider-Man arc to generate any real suspense, they need to tell us just what TV show they’re trying to fly back home in time to catch. What are the stakes? Are we even talking new episode here?” –BlinkAndItsOver

“I’ve come to the conclusion that there is only one tear in this strip; it just moves around from character to character, sort of like a virus. Except for Margo, of course: she is immune.” –Piper Grey

“Spider-Man impresses me with its ability to be completely uninteresting. At least the Phantom usually has someone holding a gun or a knife or sharp pencil or whatever; this is just one strip away from being Spiderman’ll Do It Every Time: ‘Webbo has all these amazing powers fromma spider but whoooaaa he can’t deal with the crazy airport security when hez gotta make a plane!'” –RoboMax

“So is today’s lesson about thriftiness? Because cans of shaving cream are way more expensive than disposable razors. A true plugger would lather up with soap stolen from the men’s room in the gas station.” –Jym

“Oh, the second panel [of Gil Thorp] warms the heart, seeing the teamwork between our heroes — one able to read numbers, the other words: together they are unstoppable literacy machine!” –SecretMargo

“Niki just got back from 1985, judging by that boombox.” –Tweeks_Coffee

And hey, did someone say “Curmudgeon fan meetup?” A note from faithful reader The Specatcular Spider-Brick:

Here are some pictures of the Madison ‘Mudgeon Meetup 2007 (a.k.a. MMMMMVII). We gathered for dinner Friday at Ella’s Deli, an eclectic spot with some odd decor that reminded us of the comics. We saw a Popeye straddling a rather Freudian rocket and soaring across the ceiling on a wire; a table filled with model trains à la John Patterson; and a Mark Trail lookalike with an evil twin mustache trying to hook an angry muskie (though the way he was bending over, it may well have been Rex Morgan in hip waders).

Here’s the whole gang assembled, and toasting the memory of Funky Winkerbean’s Lisa Moore. From left: The Spectacular Spider-Brick, Crooked Soricidae, Jamus the Bartender, Gadge Cubic Mole Preener, and Dingo.

And here’s another. Again, quoth The SSB: “Here, Dingo, at right, displays a treasure Jamus found in a used bookstore — a compilation of TDIET made back when it was still timely! Or did the panels from those days refer to situations in the Roaring ’20s? I think at least one had something to do with waiting for the stagecoach. Meanwhile, Gadge Cubic wonders when the TDIET he sent in will be printed.”

More pics are available at Gadge Cubic, Mole Preener’s Flickr site.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/7/07

More often than not, when I mention to people that I’m a fan of Rex Morgan, M.D., and similar strips, it completely boggles their mind. “But how can you force yourself to read that boring crap day after day?” is generally the sort of thing they ask me. Days like today are the payoffs that keep me going. Sure, the final panel, with Rex going into such paroxysms of shock and horror that his face is about to collapse in on itself, would be hilarious even without context, but you really need to backstory to appreciate all the other psychodrama going on here — everyone’s sneering at Rex’s mothball-scented bid to match his father’s rugged outdoorsmanship, and Niki blowing the whole thing to bits with his city-kid need for creature comforts.

In a conventional narrative, Rex and Niki’s initial antagonism on the trip would eventually soften into mutual compromise — Rex would wow Niki with his fly-casting skills, and Niki would teach Rex hip youth-culture lingo like “radical” and “extreme”; and maybe Niki would help Rex understand why the good doctr needs his dead father’s approval so badly, and that a situation where one is waist-deep in water and short on food isn’t necessarily a Katrina survivor’s idea of fun. But this is Rex Morgan, M.D., a strip whose hero never even tries to grow as a person or engage in a single moment of self-reflection. Niki will be made to hate fishing every bit as much as young Rex did, only to try to force it on his own son years later for reasons he can only dimly grasp. Thank God Sarah Morgan was born a girl, and is thus forever safe from Rex’s relentless Pygmalionesque schemes.

Mary Worth, 10/7/07

And sometimes the hoary old soaps can deliver perfect moments of emo pathos. I have to admit that, while the grinding gears of Mary Worth plot changes are generally audible from miles away, I’m not sure whether this is meant to be a capstone on l’affaire Drew or a setup for more heartstring-pulling to come. Either way, though, I’m going to enjoy imagining these roses sitting on Dawn’s dresser, withering more and more each day, but staying in their vase until they’re reduced to a skeletal mess, and Dawn seeming to draw more and more strength from their death until she’s more powerful than Drew could possibly imagine.

One Big Happy, 10/7/07

Ha ha, this is some of the most dick-tastic dad action in the funnies since — well, since Rex Morgan. One could argue that the point of a school-assigned spelling lists is to teach children how to spell, not how to memorize arbitrary lists of words just long enough to pass a test, and that we should be impressed that Joe has actually managed to get his little pea brain around the concept of homonyms. But then we wouldn’t have gotten to see Joe squirm about in his usual learning-avoiding contortions. Dad’s shown himself to be more of a math guy, anyway.

Spider-Man, 10/7/07

This strip is notable solely for panel five, which contains a passable likeness of Leonardo DiCaprio that apparently absorbed all of the artist’s celebrity-drawing abilities, as nobody else at this “Hollywood costume party” is even remotely recognizable as someone famous. But while I’m here, I might as well point out that this is yet another example of the most irritating weapon in Spider-Man’s narrative arsenal: the dilemma that solves itself in a day or two with no intervention from the protagonist whatsoever (see here for a particularly egregious example from a couple of years ago). In this light, it’s probably impossible to believe that the typically dramatic NEXT! box will live up to its promise. “You can’t go home again — or can you? Oh, wait, actually, I was right the first time. It turns out that you can. Never mind!”