Post Content

Dustin, 1/8/25

I think I speak for insufferable pedants everywhere when I say that I immediately clocked this as not being an actual line from Confucius — it’s way too touchy-feely — and felt great satisfaction when exactly 5 seconds of research proved me right. It’s widely attributed to the Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle, as part of the longer quote “He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything,” but nobody seems to have a specific citation for it, so that’s probably not true either. I leave the details to the elite team of Brainyquote investigators in the comments, but I do think that if there were even a thin thread connecting this to Confucius, you’d find that attribution everywhere online, because the older and more exotic the source of an anodyne statement like this, the more people love it.

Anyway, it made me wonder: What would Dustin’s dad think of Confucius? I feel like his opinion would be mixed: obviously he’d be into the filial piety and respect for hierarchy, but Confucius rejected the strict codes of Legalism and emphasized that an enlightened ruler leads by means of moral example, which a lawyer would be dubious about. I also considered trying to figure out what Dustin’s dad would think about Thomas Carlyle, but it turns out that his Wikipedia article is really long, and why would I waste my precious time on it when I could be making jokes about Dawn Weston walking into a door in Mary Worth?

Mary Worth, 1/8/25

In other news, Dawn Weston, having eschewed corrective lenses for the dumbest reason imaginable, walked into a door in Mary Worth, which incredibly means that she didn’t even get out of her own apartment building before we were treated to The Mr. Magoo-ening Of Dawn Weston. Honestly, looking at those doors I half expected them to open automatically, and maybe she did as well, who can say. Anyway, I look forward to Dirk tactically abandoning his “Nerdgirl” taunt and moving on to “Bruisegirl Nosebleedchick.”

Hi and Lois, 1/8/25

Ditto, she’s been around since 1954, she’s never had any teeth, and at this point she’s pretty sure she’s never going to have any teeth. Stop taunting her! Mush is all she will ever know, across however many decades she has left to suffer in this ageless hell!

Post Content

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/7/25

Look, I get it, soap opera strips are a slow-moving medium, you can’t count on people reading every day so you have to repeat stuff, etc., etc. But I think if you start the week by introducing a new storyline, like “Sarah’s ex-babysitter Kelly, who used to be a hot goth but was transformed into a square-ass loser by long-term exposure to the Morgans, is in college now,” by Tuesday you should have advanced beyond the “Wow, linear time sure does progress” phone call stage.

The Phantom, 1/7/25

The Phantom recently wrapped up a story arc that lasted literally seven years, so I guess we have to understand that its pacing game is on a different level. Throughout this whole “there’s a novelty pub in London where everyone’s been punched by the Phantom” plotline, we’ve been seeing bits of an interview the proprietor did on a thinly veiled version of the Graham Norton Show where he dishes on Phantom lore. Not sure if this is an attempt to get new readers up to speed on the strip; I think it’s a bit too impressionistic for that, but I do admire the narrative ambition.

Mary Worth, 1/7/25

Mary Worth, as always, shows how it’s done. Nothing much happens in today’s strip per se … but a crucial decision has been made that we feel in our bones will lead to wacky results, and now we’re on the edge of our seats waiting to learn what those results will be. Maybe Dawn will end up making out with the incorrect slab-shaped man down at the club, maybe she’ll put hot sauce in her salad instead of ranch dressing and have a meltdown on her date, or maybe she’ll simply mow Ian down with her car as she swerves around the Charterstone parking lot. The possibilities are endless!

Post Content

Judge Parker, 1/6/25

Detective Yelich has been Sam’s inside man on the police force since the Great Judge Meth Caper of ’23, which, you may recall, included an episode in which Yelich got drunk and kidnapped a material witness to a murder case. So, yeah, detective, Sam isn’t gonna buy you shit! He can already threaten to ruin your life if you don’t help Alan with his little maybe-my-daughter’s-a-murderer problem! The only reason he had you meet him at the diner is so there would be witnesses if you decided that killing him might be easier and more fun than living under his thumb forever!

Marvin, 1/6/25

If you ever decide that “FINE, my comic strip WON’T be about poop for once, so what’s a good joke that doesn’t involve poop,” you could do worse than pulling out whatever trivia book you have as reading material in your bathroom and building a punchline out of something you find when you open it at random. In the interests of intellectual honesty, though, one of your strip’s characters must read said trivia item out of said book. Anyway, my favorite part of this strip is that Marvin’s trivia-loving friend has a big smile on his face as Marvin delivers the punchline. “That’s right, Marvin!” he’s thinking. “That rabbit is long dead. And it serves him right!”

Family Circus, 1/7/25

28 years ago, Ma Keane got a new haircut, and while strip reruns still include anachronisms like old-fashioned metal trash cans, the family matriarch’s old ‘do is always replaced with the new one as if it were one of Stalin’s purged generals. That’s true even if she’s wearing a kerchief that no longer serves much of a purpose wrapped around her newer, shorter hairstyle. Anyway, Big Daddy Keane sure is grumpy, presumably because he found a box that he briefly thought was full of delicious Jack Daniels but then he opened it and found a stack of dumb old issues of the Saturday Evening Post instead.