Marvin, 3/25/25

"Wow," many of my longtime readers have no doubt concluded, "So Josh makes money by flying into a rage whenever the comic strip Marvin does jokes about shitting? Nice work if you can get it." And that's fair, but it isn't all fun and games. For instance, part of my job also entails dispassionately and meticulously keeping track of the timeline of Marvin's parents' lives and relationships. We already knew that Jeff is 35, which means that he put "Who Let The Dogs Out" on a mix CD in college ironically, rather than sincerely. Today we learn that that he and Jenny have been married for seven years, since he was 28, another interesting data point. It is, of course, difficult to get a handle on how old Marvin is exactly, what with him walking around and talking in complete sentences but also not being potty trained, but he's definitely several years younger than seven, which means there was a fairly extended Marvin-free period in Jeff and Jenny's marriage. Now, the question this raises is: did they originally love one another, and the introduction of the awful Marvin in their lives lead them to the Lockhorns-like state of enmity we see in the strip? Or did they always hold each other in blistering contempt, and that anger made Marvin the hell-infant that we all know and loathe?

Andy Capp, 3/25/25