Darkness at the heart of 'Marvin'

My slight rewrite of today's Marvin.

Tom Armstrong's Marvin strikes me as one of the unhappiest domestic comedies in the world of syndicated cartoons. Sure, people point to Funky Winkerbean as a cesspool of ceaseless misery, which it is, and The Lockhorns do not disguise their hatred for one another. But the ostensibly cheerful Marvin, about a baby who never ages and the parents who are stuck caring for him for all eternity, seems profoundly darker than either of those other examples. So I decided to take this Sunday Marvin and give it just a slight rewrite.

Here's another recent Marvin rewrite of mine. This is a little more upbeat, because I've given the parents a way out of their personal purgatory.

Shouldn't there be a horror film called Gore-phanage by now?

Aaaaaaaand it's another 'Marvin' parody, but first a WARNING!

"Attention, Ladies and Gentlemen." Artwork by Joe Blevins.

Attention, ladies and gentlemen. We are about to show you yet another parody of Tom Armstrong's long-running comic strip, Marvin. Although we have brought you comic strip parodies and remixes in the past, including ones of Marvin, we felt obligated to warn you that this one is different. It contains... a word, ladies and gentlemen. And not just any word but a word which many people find offensive. That word, ladies and gentlemen, is poop. Not only is that word used in the strip, it is used with abandon, over and over again. The effect, we are afraid to say, is quite disturbing. So if you are someone who takes offense at the word poop -- or if you are the parent of a young or impressionable child -- we ask that you and the child leave the auditorium for the next 60 seconds. Read further if you must, but remember -- we warned you.

In five years, this is what a real Marvin strip will look like. Except he'll say "shit."

A new diversion: 'Marvin' minus thought balloons

Marvin minus all those pesky jokes and stories.

Since 1982, Tom Armstrong's Marvin has been sullying newspaper comics pages with the dreary, laughless adventures of an obnoxious child, Marvin Miller, who remains disturbingly unable to develop past infancy. He should be in his early thirties by now, but he still looks and behaves like a preschooler. Doomed to spend eternity in diapers, the boy obsesses gleefully over his own feces and the discomfort it causes in others.

Most of the strip's alleged humor derives, in fact, from the child's copious and foul excretions, though Marvin's selfishness, penchant for destruction, and fearsome temper are important components of the strip as well. Marvin's weary, utterly defeated parents, Jeff and Jenny, bear the brunt of Marvin's wrath; their unenviable fate is to forever tend to the monster they themselves created.

Aesthetically, Marvin is an obvious derivative of Jim Davis' Garfield, with the pudgy, flame-haired child a mere stand-in for the famously overfed orange tabby. Deprived of the ability to speak, both Marvin and Garfield "communicate" through thought bubbles. The other humans in these strips should not be able to hear or understand these thoughts, unless they possess telepathic skills, and yet many of the jokes in Marvin and Garfield rely on just such telepathy.

I wondered what would happen if Tom Armstrong removed these thought bubbles from Marvin. What would the strip look like without them? The answers are seen above. Marvin becomes the story of a mostly-happy, forever-mute child who occasionally changes his facial expression for no apparent reason.