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As you may have heard, the mid-Atlantic region has been blanketed with snow, with yet more on the way! Fortunately, said snow hasn’t interfered with the flow of sweet electricity and/or Internet-borne witticisms into my snowbound home, allowing me to present you with the following COMMENT OF THE WEEK!
“Imagine the poor DEA agent who ends up at a plugger’s house: ‘Man, there’s enough animal tranquilizer here to take down a bear. Oh, he is? Never mind.’” –BigTed
And the runners up! Very funny!
“Thinking of all the raw, primal love he and Abby shared made Wilbur briefly forget how to use ‘civilized’ word structures, such as pronouns.” –Perky Bird
“Two panels and just 56 words in today’s Mary Worth and yet Wilbur’s last sentence is still missing a word. By contrast each of the 3 wispy hairs on his forehead are meticulously rendered in each panel. The priorities at Mary Worth Quality Control are a little hard to fathom.” –DaveyK
“That’s what broke us apart. Specifically, it severed my head from my body. If I don’t hold it fast like this, it will fall off and roll away.” –Nekrotzar
“Most disturbing strip of the year. You know Giella wanted to put in yellow pit stains but was stopped by the censor.” –mr 12 oz can
“I’m trying to increase Mary Worth awareness among college students. I promote her cause by advising everyone to make the most socially acceptable choices, regardless of what might be best for them! Next up: buying all of my friends ugly salmon-colored blazers.” –rachel
“What is the damn deal with all the close-ups lately? These characters are unappealing enough from a medium distance. The ideal would be somewhere between the Elrod ‘now entering state forest’ POV and an aerial map, but I’ll settle for anything over Wilbur Weston breathing on me.” –Chromium
“Substituting limp pieces of macaroni for bait worms is exactly the kind of thing that Mark Trail would consider as ‘something one does in an emergency.’” –teddytoad
“The blond fellow backing up Mark’s testimony? Color his hair black and, my God! It’s Adolph Hitler! If he’s got the final solution for cleaning our water, I think I’ll stick with my good ole fashioned dirty-but-fascist-free AMERICAN water, thank you very much.” –DownwithOPP
“Coach Kaz, representing the best of 1987’s hairstyles. He’s also probably wearing Zubaz.” –Howland Awl
“Oh man, Dawn’s angry face as she angrily arranges flowers (or not; they’re probably just in the background but I like imagining they’re part of the scene). And then the way she’s clutching her head/ear in the second panel. Does it hurt, Dawn? Do all those thoughts make your brain hurt?” –Carly
“Don’t be ridiculous, Marty. Gil is never indecisive. Indecision is for people who remotely give a rat’s ass about anything, ever.” –Violet
“Gil Thorp never feels like a narrative to me. More like doing shrooms and wandering through a high school with a strobe light.” –bunivasal
“Everyone needs to lay off poor Dawn today — her hearing aid’s acting up and her dentures and/or face won’t stay put. We’ve all been there.” –Walker of Dog
“Notice how the stakes keep getting lowered here. The wildly varying results of being seen include: (1) death, then (2) insanity, and finally (3) leaving a Canadian jazz club in a calm, orderly manner.” –Joe Blevins
“Wilbur Weston would never make ‘sweet love.’ Imagine an intoxicated walrus inching its way across the ice toward a bored, uninterested walrus in a hat. Imagine that walrus overtaking the second walrus and the sounds of flapping flesh and the general unpleasantness of the act. That would be Kathleen Turner and William Hurt compared to Wilbur Weston and Abby Evans.” –Dingo, the Essence of Purity and Virtue Incarnate™
“Looks like Dawn is pantomiming her scenes for the Charterstone production of Hamlet she’s appearing in. She has the lead, of course, hence the haircut.” –Hibbleton
In response to a suggestion that Dawn might be transforming herself into The Joker: “Of course, if you say to Mary Worth ‘Why so serious?’, be prepared to hear exactly why she’s so serious. In excruciating detail. With a quote from Thomas Merton.” –Artist formerly known as Ben
“Y’know, with just a little tweaking, this production of West Side Story could be made much less bizarre: North Side Story: An edgy new musical highlighting the tensions and tragedies between The Lutefisks, a gang of depressed Swedes, and The Smørrebrøds, a gang of ever-partying Danes, in a small farming community in Minnesota. The score, by Leonard Bjornson, includes such exciting numbers as ‘I Feel Bored’ (’I feel bored/Oh so bored/I feel bored, suicidal, and depressed…’), ‘Dear Lay Minister Lofgren’ (&lsqup;Deep down inside me is Köttbullar’), and ‘Kølig’ (‘Get kølig, boy! / Got a Tuborg in your pocket’).” –odinthor
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Dick Tracy, 2/8/10
Dick Tracy has been even more incomprehensible than usual lately, and what I have been able to understand has just irritated me, but I do read it diligently, in case any gems pop up that ought to be shared with my readership! And lo and behold, panel two is just such a gem. “…Not everyone loves you, and you must die.” Couldn’t this sinister, gnomic pronouncement be uttered about each and every one of us? None of us is so lovable as to earn the affections of all, and each of us is mortal! Of course, most of us won’t be terribly maimed by an exploding Stradivarius, with a square-jawed fascist saying something pithy over us as we die in agony, for which we can be thankful.
Luann, 2/8/10
Speaking of people nobody likes, it’s Luann! It actually took me a minute to get my head around the punchline here (i.e., everyone will finally know Luann DeGroot, who will be in disguise, as a Puerto Rican); I at first assumed that we were meant to laugh at Luann’s cheerfully proposed brownfacing. Still, I rather think that her classmates will remember her for her performance, if only as “that girl who got the school picketed by the National Council of La Raza.”
Popeye, 2/8/10
Speaking of incomprehensible and irritating, Popeye just ended one of its stories that I half paid attention to and is about to start another one in which I’ll probably be equally uninterested. Still, you have to admire this strip for showing that even a plot that is extremely grim and all too real for too many people today — a desperate attempt to hide the extent of your financial ruin from your family, who depends on you economically — can be made hilarious through ersatz dialect. “I yam out of monies!’” Ho ho ho!
Marmaduke, 2/8/10
Look, lady, if you keep marrying them, he’s going to keep killing and eating them. I’m not sure why this is such a hard concept for you to grasp.
Mary Worth, 2/7/10
Uh oh — it looks like Dawn isn’t going to sit back just acquiesce to losing her father’s affections to some scam artist! It seems that she is going to try shock therapy by finding the one person who can be guaranteed to terrify Wilbur back to his senses: erstwhile romantic rival Martin Clark. Sure, he’s been dead for years, but that will make the ultimate confrontation all the more harrowing, as Dawn rigs up the rich man’s corpse to move and speak like a marionette. “Look at me, Wilbur!” Martin will say, thanks to the ventriloquist lessons Dawn’s been taking on the sly. “I’m a charred, reassembled cadaver, and yet Abby would still choose me over you!”
Blondie, 2/7/10
This right here is seven panels of Superbowl Sunday inanity punctuated by one glorious moment of complete madness. I suppose that longtime readers of Blondie are supposed to know that spinning around on one’s head is an indicator of extreme, uncontrollable emotion of some kind, but to the casual viewer, it would just appear that Dagwood, Herb, and Daisy have chosen to express their football-related outrage with a stunning display of eerily synchronized breakdancing. Which I for one am totally in favor of.
Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/7/10
You know who I just realized that I totally don’t get at all? Berna! She’s Rex and June’s receptionist and she runs a successful salon of some sort and she uses Yugoslav generalissimo Tito’s recipes to dominate the local restaurant scene? Why would such a power broker need a relatively menial job behind a clinic’s front desk? Perhaps she uses it to drum up business for her salon. “Honey, trust me, Western medicine can’t do a thing about those split ends. Here’s my number.”
Meanwhile, I look forward to seeing how this strip attempts to make a guy named “Toots” who has a stripey rugby shirt, a goofy little beard, and a lot of hair gel into some kind of threat against Rex and June’s carefully constructed bourgeois order.
Marvin, 2/7/10
Since we only get a single glimpse of Marvin’s dad in this strip, in which he appears to be a good 15 or 20 feet away from his terrible little son and not getting any closer, I’m guessing this is less “father/son bonding” and more “let’s bring the hateful monster outside and leave him there until he ‘accidentally’ freezes to death.”
Mark Trail, 2/6/10
I may have missed this earlier, but it appears that the hilariously surnamed Parker brothers are hilariously named Moe and Joe. What whimsical parents they must have had, to give them rhyming names! Clearly the only way they had to rebel against their twee upbringing was to grow facial hair and generally dick it up out on the lake, with their big motors. Still, we can see a bit of their wacky heritage out on display in the rapid-fire shirt exchange they made between panels one and two, just for absurdist fun. Mark and Senator Hatcher just stand there with their hands manfully on their hips, their low-key masculinity offering a counterpoint to their desperate antics
In panel three, Joe, or possibly Moe, shows that he’s well acquainted with the most up-to-date way to effect political change, which is to buttonhole one of your elected officials and scream at him.
For Better For Worse, 2/6/10
FBOFW reruns are like comics methadone: not as good as the real thing, and yet I still can’t seem to taper off. I do enjoy them for their sociological insight into late ’70s/early ’80s Canada, anyway. Today we learn what the main characteristic of a dark, seedy Montreal jazz club of the era was: omnipresent menacing mustaches.
Marmaduke, 2/6/10
Come now, Marmaduke’s lovingly curated collection of human femurs is a work of art, not a mere job. I mean, I at least hope that nobody’s paying him for it.
Apartment 3-G, 2/5/10
OK, you guys, are you ready for a theory that will blow your mind? Huh? Are you?
Before I launch into said theory let me, for the benefit of relative newcomers, recap the Story of Margo. Margo was raised by her wealthy father Martin and his wife — who, it turns out, was not her mother. Her mother is Gabriella, a lowly maid, who Martin knocked up. When Margo found out this sordid tale as an adult, it wreaked havoc with her family life and ability to feel ordinary human emotions, obviously, and she seems deeply suspicious that her parents are palling around again.
And what about Martin’s wife, the one who, presumably, Margo thought of as her mother for most of her childhood, but who probably viewed Margo with some combination of horror and disgust? Well, we don’t really know much about her, other than her name, which is … Roberta.
What’s a common nickname for Roberta? Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Or, really, more specifically, are you thinking what the folks over at the Lovely Ladies of Apartment 3-G blog are thinking, who had the idea first? Is the cheating husband Bobbie is obsessively chasing Martin? Is that building across the street Gabriella’s? Is this glorious lunatic pill-popping shrink-screwing floozy the woman whose disdain and resentment shaped Margo into the woman she is today? Will this plotline end in a fantabulous one-on-one Bobbie-Margo battle that will result in the two of them resolving their differences and teaming up to destroy anyone in their way? I am giddy!
(And if you aren’t reading the Lovely Ladies of Apartment 3-G, well, why the heck not?)
Pluggers, 2/5/10
Pluggers pretty much go through life in a prescription med haze, so why shouldn’t their pets, too? It sure would keep the damn things from barking constantly and cutting into pluggers’ valuable staring-at-the-wall-and-drooling time! Plus, giving pills to animals is the sort of thing that seems hilarious when you’re high.
Beetle Bailey, 2/5/10
Meanwhile, the poor vendor who owns that cart is lying on some city sidewalk bleeding to death from a bayonet wound to the gut. But, whatever, that Sarge sure likes to eat, amiright?
Beetle Bailey, 2/4/10
OK, I’ll admit it: today’s unspeakably perverse Beetle Bailey, in which Sarge’s leering sex maniac of a dog takes him to some kind of canine fetish club, made me laugh. (I’m assuming the “fire plug dancing” bit means that their target audience is into watersports.) I think what makes this strip for me is Sarge’s look of wide-eyed innocence giving way to growing shock in the second panel. So many things he will learn tonight, about dogs and what they like to smell and/or pee on!
Gil Thorp, 2/4/10
I was going to make some sort of snide comment about how every sentence in panels two and three could be construed as a double entendre, but then I caught site of Gil’s sweater vest, and now can think about nothing but said sweater vest. Do you think it’s in Mudlark team colors? That would be ever so keen!
Mary Worth, 2/4/10
“It must be the same guy! Such an unusual name, after all!”
Dawn better keep track of her father while she thought-balloons, as Wilbur has snuck away to hunch over his computer in the background and go all crazy social-networking style. Watch out, Dawn! Maybe he’ll discover that daughter he always wanted!
Dennis the Menace, 2/4/10
Too bad you won’t be alive to see it, old man! Maybe Dennis’ll bring the little tykes over to dance on your grave!