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Blondie, 11/11/06

You know, Dagwood gets walked in on when he’s in the bathtub an awful lot. It’s one of this strip’s stock jokes, but you have to admit that it’s pretty weird. But our nosey paint-jockey’s comment made me think, “Say, it’s kind of unusual that Dagwood is shampooing in the bath, rather than in the shower,” which then made me think “OH MY GOD DAGWOOD AND BLONDIE DON’T HAVE A SHOWER WHAT WEIRDOS.” Seriously, there’s no shower head, or curtain, or even a rod where such a curtain would be, and the soap dish is blatantly at tub-level. This strip shows the showerless tub at a different angle. This goes a long way towards explaining why Dagwood is so damn late for his carpool every morning.

Hey, is that a glass door on the bathroom? This gets more disturbing by the moment.

Mark Trail, 11/12/06

I love the way Jake and Snake — surely two of the dumber miscreants in the history of Mark Trail villainy, and that’s saying a lot — don’t ever form any kind of long-term villainous plans, but rather lunge at each new opportunity for evil like a giant rabbit at a delicious carrot. Sure, bear-baiting and illegal organ sales are all good fun, but why not engage in a little kidnapping and torture if you have an opportunity? Unless they think that Kelly Welly gallbladders sell for good money on the Asian market, they seem to be losing track of the goal here.

I also enjoy the reassuring similarities in the appearance of Mark Trail villains. Facial hair is of course an obvious indicator of evil, but the orange-shirted, non-mulleted half of Jake and Snake (has it actually been established which is which?) is beginning to bear an uncanny resemblance to the no-necked patriarch of the petnapping hillbilly clan from two or three storylines ago:

The Phantom, 11/11/06

The NEXT: box in the Saturday Phantom is pretty much always awesome. This one sent the phrase “Last night the Phantom saved my his life,” to the tune of the title line from Indeep’s 1983 hit “Last Night A DJ Saved My Life”, rattling through my head for the past 36 hours or so, so I thought I’d subject you to the same treatment.

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When I logged on to my custom Houston Chronicle comics page this evening, I discovered that, alone among my chosen strips, Pluggers was refusing to load.

What could have caused such a thing to happen? Was it the Democrats? Was Pluggers’ down-home wisdom too true for Nancy Pelosi and her chardonnay-swilling crowd? Eagerly, I rushed over to the Pluggers Web site to find out precisely what truth it dared to speak to power.

Pluggers, 11/10/06

I was kind of dissapointed. Ha ha, it’s funny because he’s bald! I’m a little concerned about the stream of black dots emerging from the back of his head, however. They seem to be the same color as his eyebrows, more or less. Are those the last chunks of his hair, flying away in the breeze? Was that fancy sports car really worth the last shreds of your head-covering dignity, bald dog-man?

One Big Happy, 11/10/06

I usually leave the silent penultimate panel watching to the Silent Penultimate Panel Watch, but the instance in today’s One Big Happy was particularly interesting. Panel three captures that awkward moment in which you’ve told a joke and nobody gets it and so you have to stare or gesture or something to drive your point home. Of course, the advantage of being in a comic strip is that such awkward moments don’t have to exist; Joe’s joke would have worked without that silent third panel. With that panel in there, however, I almost think the strip is supposed to be less a vehicle for Joe’s slam on Ruthie and more an examination of how poorly he told it. His use of the phrase “real fast” in the final panel is undermined by the silent frame that preceded it, which, since comic time is ultimately determined by the reader, could last as long as you care to stare at it.

Grandpa, as usual, would rather be somewhere else.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 11/10/06

Having apparently completely exhausted the inventory of things that they will do every time, TDIET has now apparently decided to move on to things that even it admits they will never, ever do.

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Ziggy, 11/9/06

See, “diversity” used to be code for “black people,” but now it’s code for “gay people.” This represents the new PC horrorshow that awaits us under a Democratic-controlled Congress. Marriage is between one man and one woman, not a cat and two mice. Sickos.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 11/9/06

Speaking of which, I’m not a biologist or anything, but I’m pretty sure only boy cows have horns, which makes this already disturbing strip even weirder.

The Phantom, 11/9/06

This pretty much takes the cake, though. The dude in skin-tight lycra, the dog sticking its tongue in the drugged, blindfolded woman’s ear, the interrobang … sick, I tell you, sick.

And here’s two soaps from today that it would have been sick to ignore…

Apartment 3-G, 11/9/06

OH MY GOD OH MY GOD WHO DO YOU THINK MARGO’S “ASSISTANT” IS? Is it Tommie? Lu Ann? Gina? The hobo who saved her life a few years ago? Margo herself in a blonde wig, answering to “Maggie”? I am on tenterhooks, I tell you what.

Mary Worth, 11/9/06

Mary Worth has of course been delicious all week, as Mary seethes inwardly at her coming obsolescence. Panel two may be the moment at which anger turns to self-doubt, the moment when Mary’s steely self-confidence began to soften just a little. More interesting, though, is panel one, in which she appears to be shoveling off-white glop out of bucket onto a cookie sheet. Many of you have wondered why exactly Mary has a thigh-high bench in the middle of her kitchen; the fact that she needs to drop her … food … from about a foot above its target would seem to illustrate how impractical this arrangement is. But I’ll bet she just likes the sound it makes.