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Mary Worth, 9/14/04

Oh, man, just when I think the current Mary Worth storyline can’t get any better, it does! I knew that when Mary sniffed the fumes from Tommy’s tokin’ this weekend that fireworks couldn’t be far behind, but I never imagined that she’d be so bitchy about it. The nice old lady that we perhaps all imagined Mary to be would have just sat Iris down and said, “I’m concerned about your son’s drug use.” Instead, she serves tea, makes an oblique reference to the smoke detector, and then, with that “whatever,” slips the knife right in between the ribs. Zing! Hopefully now that Iris the social climber has been humiliated by Charterstone’s main arbiter of status, she and her ex-con son will slink back to the trailer park where they belong.

The other day I was in the locker room at our pool and overheard a conversation between two 7-to-10-year-olds, one of whom claimed to have spied some other people smoking pot. “It smelled like tomato soup!” he asserted confidently. Apparently Mary has a little more drug experience to draw on.

(By the way, I stole the title of this strip from a recurring feature in Tom the Dancing Bug, which is one of my favorite non-daily comics.)

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Non Sequitur, 9/13/04

I have nothing to say about this comic, except that I think that the word “jackassery” is funny, and that I’m proud to live in a country where it appears on the comics page. Try to work it into casual conversation with a coworker or loved one this week.

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Apartment 3-G, 9/12/04

This gets my vote for one of the creepiest installments in the comics since I started doing this blog. There’s something deeply weird about Lu Ann’s need to atone for her ancestors’ slave-owning ways by closing herself into this Underground Railway hiding place. Since she went through a bout of agoraphobia last year, when she didn’t leave her apartment for weeks, we know she likes enclosed spaces, so maybe her desire to learn in this way is a little self-serving. It’d almost be kind of kinky, if Lu Ann weren’t such a sexless goody-goody. The weird way she’s colored in this strip, with her lips the same color as the rest of her face, make her look almost corpse-like — just adding to the creepiness of entombing her.

In subsequent installments, we learn that Lu Ann’s harrowing, life-changing experience in that dark chamber has led her to boldly confront her past by researching slavery on the Internet. Maybe someday soon she’ll meet an actual black person!