Post Content

Mary Worth, 7/23/06

BEHOLD PANEL SIX! MARY’S HEAVENLY GLORY AND RADIANCE IS REVEALED! MARY WORTH, QUEEN OF ANGELS, HAVE MERCY UPON US! WE SINNERS ARE NOT WORTHY TO BASK IN YOUR GLOW!

Ahem. Mary’s divine nimbus livens up this otherwise shapeless outing in which Toby gossips in a fashion in which no actual human ever gossips, to wit: with a total dearth of even made-up details as to what Aldo’s done and how the information got to Toby’s ears. This is the sort of dialogue one expects out of a grizzled old gasoline station owner trying to keep a group of kids from going up to that haunted campground, not Charterstone’s resident trophy wife.

In panels four and seven, Toby has the concerned and slightly confused look that supermodels get when they’ve discovered some great injustice in the world and can’t understand why the public won’t take their political activism seriously. Fortunately for plotting purposes, I’m guessing Mary will ignore her and run head-first into danger.

Post Content

B.C., 7/22/06

See, this strip is actually a lot more clever than it might appear at first glance. By posing a series of incomprehensible humor-style elements — Do electronic components ever actually feature “charcoal” lettering? Wouldn’t black golf balls be easier to see than said lettering on said components? — it distracts from the central problem, which is, you’ve got cavemen talking about golf and electronics, what the hell.

Mark Trail, 7/22/06

I was going to say something to the effect of “The whole Kelly-Welly-as-Lost-Forest’s-official-tramp thing is getting old,” but then I realized that it wasn’t, and it never will. I particularly love the extreme closeup on Kelly’s dark, evil, seductive eyes in the third panel. I’m assuming that this is Ranger Rick’s point-of-view: in the world of Mark Trail, this is the last thing you see before you wake up with a nasty case of chlamydia.

Wizard of Id, 7/22/06

Ah, it’s Yet Another Lame Strip Written By An Old White Guy Featuring An Anachronistic Golf Joke (YALSWBAOWGFAAGJ™). You might not know this if you don’t have parents who watch the Golf Channel voluntarily, but all those beasts the Wiz is thought-ballooning about in the second panel are the nicknames of various professional golfers. That’s right: Id’s dwarfish despot is forcing his chief thaumaturgist to dismember the cream of the PGA’s crop just to shave a few strokes off his handicap, the sick bastard. Anyway, the reason this strip caught my eye is because the thought balloon in panel two has some shading on the bottom, which usually is a cartoon convention for anger, but this time around it appears to signify … nothing. Nothing at all. Wasted strokes. Wasted!

For Better Or For Worse, 7/22/06

Worst. Onomatopoeia. Ever.

Post Content

Curtis, 7/21/06

Wow, Curtis, you make me feel all funny inside, in the following ways:

• Is it OK to be appalled at the child abuse joke and yet still impressed by the wordplay of “slap the taste out of your mouth”?
• Are the Curtises’ black apples left over from some sort of twisted goth Adam and Eve musical number?

Gil Thorp, 7/21/06

See, Ben Franklin, there have been some advances in histrionics in the 216 years since your death. Nowadays, when people shout “No-o-o-o!”, they usually shake their fists at the skies, get down on one knee and pound the earth, and weep openly. Perhaps putting an index finger on the lower lip was a sign of great emotional distress during the 18th century, but nowadays it just makes you look contemplative.

Marty Moon may refer to his winnings as “only” $20, but he’s holding and staring at that Andrew Jackson-festooned note with an expression of rapt wonder, as if he were a starving Darfurian refugee and somebody just handed him a steak.