Featured strips are Bo Nanas by John Kovaleski; New Adventures of Queen Victoria by Pab Sungenis; Tarzan (as drawn in the 1990s by Gray Morrow); Chuckle Brothers by Brian Boychuk, Ron Boychuck and Ronnie Martin; Mahoney, Goldsmith & Garnett’s current version of Reg Smythe’s Andy Capp; Joe Staton & Mike Curtis’ new and inspired reworking of Dick Tracy; and Darrin Bell & Theron Heir’s Rudy Park. Oh, and in honor of me being in Jim Davis’s home state of Indiana this week, Garfield.

If Romeo & Juliet are this passionate at the balcony scene, just think how steamed Veronica (who’s she playing, anyway? the nurse?) will be when they actually share a room for “‘Tis the lark! No, ’tis the nightingale!”

From Betty & Veronica #181, January 2003 (a decade ago this very month).

I hope the guy in back with the overturned sundae on his head gets cast as the wacky servant.

In the story (from Betty & Veronica #252, the April 2011 issue), Betty prepares for her Samantha role by actually living in Veronica’s house, with her own private maid.

On opening night, Betty’s friend Nancy compliments her thus:

“Gee, Betty! How’d you manage to portray this haughty, upper-crust character who is so appealing?”

The comics sections are abuzz with Sept. 11 acknowledgements. Nice of Mary Worth to bring Oscar Wilde into hers. The quote is from Wilde’s Salome. The strip, we eagerly subscribe to via Daily Ink.

Now there’s a Globe Theatre production directed by Matthew Dunster, starring Paul Hilton in the title role and Arthur Darvill as Mephistopheles. I’m unlikely to be able to fly to London to see it, even though it’s running until Oct. 2. I’ll have to subsist on the photos and reviews.

The Independent on Sunday calls the show “fine, lucid”. Charles Spencer of The Telegraph is unimpressed: “This is a Faustus that often looks impressive, with its sinister choreography and grotesque designs, but when it comes to genuine chills and thrills, the audience is left seriously short-changed. “ Theorizes the equally unthrilled Brian Logan in The Guardian, “the problem is partly that we don’t believe in hell any more. So it’s easy to relate to Faustus’s initial scorn of the concept, and hard to credit his deathbed fear.” London Magazine’s Edward Lukes gets credit for leading off his review with the important observation that here’s the Globe, bastion of the Bard of Avon, finding room for his main rival. But then Lukes fall into the same theological and moral ruminations as nearly all the other critics do.

I read half a dozen reviews of the show before I gained any inkling that Dunster’s production might have some humor in it. Marlowe’s script certainly does, and the interlude of magic tricks which illustrate the protagonist’s initial delight at having traded his soul to Satan was built upon by producers over the centuries until The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus was a comedy treat rivaling only that other dizzy death-dealer, Mr. Punch.

So I really want to believe this review by Neil Norman in the The Express—not London’s most trusted and exalted newspaper, perhaps, but one which appreciates Doctor Faustus the way I always have. “Filled with magic tricks, diabolical conjurations and ribald jiggerypokery,” Norman writes, “Christopher Marlowe’s play is a far cry from po-faced theological dispute.”
The other critics have obviously got Goethe on the brain. Lighten up.

The criticism seems rather harsh, considering that the performance brought Mr. Weatherbee to tears. And who among us wouldn’t wish to see Archie Andrews and Betty Cooper performing 19th century melodrama?

Spider-Man returned for more scorn and derision this week, as the troubled show resumed previews after a hiatus in which several key members of the creative team were changed.

Has it struck anyone else how Peter Parker-esque this all is? Brainy whiz kid clearly has talent, but tends to put his insecure, uncertain, experimental self forward, while some pretty impressive feats go unnoticed, misunderstood and lambasted.

In any case, they’ve webbed in the appropriate rewriter for this new attempt to set the show on course. I knew Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa when he was a student at the Yale School of Drama, and we talked about comics a lot. One of the scripts he was working on at Yale, Weird Comic Book Fantasy, involved a comic book teenager strongly reminiscent of Archie Andrews shacking up with Chicago thrill-murderers Leopold & Loeb. A couple years ago, Aguirre-Sacasa wrote a completely new book for the 1966 Strouse/Adams musical It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane.. It’s Superman. Lots of his shows have had comic references in them, not to mention references like H.P. Lovecraft which fall within the vocabulary of comics geeks. His The Mystery Plays played Yale Rep in 2004 and Dark Matters (about an presumed alien abduction) was workshopped at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference in Waterford in 2003.

Thanks in part to a Marvel Comics initiative to get young playwrights to script some of their comics, immediately upon graduation from Yale Aguirre-Sacasa landed a dream gig. He penned the mini-series 4, in which he had the Fantastic Four lose all their government grants while embroiled in class action suits against them; the hero team went bankrupt and had to go seek regular jobs. It didn’t long for Aguirre-Sacasa to earn the honor of writing for Marvel’s flagship character Spider-Man. This included taking the character in whole new action and fashion directions for the Sensational Spider-Man series (distinct from the original Amazing Spider-Man or the other arachnid adjectives). If any writer can connect the threads of the convoluted Spider-Man mythos into an action-packed scenario that theater audiences can comprehend, it’s Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. He was interviewed by the Associated Press, USA Today and other mainstream media outlets this week, making him the designated voice of the new creative team behind Spider-Man.

Not that the last Spider-Man scripter was shabby. It was Glen BergerAs with Aguirre-Sacasa, the Yale Cabaret was hip to Berger before just about anyone else was—his one-man sensation Underneath the Lintel had its world premiere at the Cabaret well before it became a long-running Off Broadway cult sensation. (It’s since been done locally at the Long Wharf and again just last year at the Cabaret.) Wier Harmon directed Berger’s Great Men of Science Nos. 21 & 22 as his graduate thesis for the Yale School of Drama in 1998.

As a curious outsider (the closest I’ve come to the show is getting handed a half-off flier during the last days of its previous preview period, while I was on my way down Broadway to something else), I worry mainly about the provincialism inherent in erecting such a mammoth, technically complex show. It appears to me that Spider-Man doesn’t have a hope of touring in any semblance of its high-flying, death-defying Broadway model.

Well, that’ll be a problem for a whole different creative team down the line.