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Mary Worth, 1/12/25

This Mary Worth storyline is sadly all too realistic in its depiction of emotional abuse and manipulation. But it’s extremely unrealistic in its depiction of someone who isn’t wearing her usual corrective lenses. I’m sorry, if Dawn’s vision is so bad that she’s just squirting ketchup all over the table in a vague attempt to season her fries, I refuse to believe she has any ability to see anything other than vague colors or shapes, or has any idea where she is or who she’s even talking to. I was also going to say that the transition that got us to “Duckgirl” isn’t realistic either, but I guess I need to keep in mind that Dirk is extremely stupid, so I’ll allow it for now.

Daddy Daze, 1/12/25

I swear that I am usually capable of processing a deliberate incongruity in the fictional world of a comic strip as a “joke,” but my least favorite instance of this is when an animal or some other entity that shouldn’t be able to read or write at all can, but is bad at it (probably the canonical version is the Far Side “CAT FUD” panel). That’s why I kind of approve of this strip, in which the Daddy Daze baby, who we are meant to understand is capable of advanced cognition that he communicates in a series of “ba”s, appears to have produced a professional-quality pamphlet, and hasn’t just handed over a piece of paper with squiggles all over it. Of course, you all know my theory that the baby is just a baby and the Daddy Daze daddy is insane, but nothing we see here precludes the possibility that the daddy produced the pamphlet himself in some kind of fugue state.

Hi and Lois, 1/12/25

Do you ever feel envious of Trixie, who lives outside the world of adult responsibilities and even childhood fears and enjoys a simple existence with her best friend, the light of the Sun itself? Well, it turns out that actually she perceives all sources of light and heat as separate conscious and jealous entities, and is constantly caught in their complex web of social relations as they jockey for status. Sounds real stressful, honestly, so maybe we should rethink our attitudes about her life.

Shoe, 1/12/25

I was about to make fun of Shoe for saying you can’t make money on the Internet, but then I remembered that he’s a newspaper editor, so he probably knows from pretty hard experience about not making money on the Internet.

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Six Chix, 12/12/24

OK, I get the impulse to turn a bitten-out semicircle on this pastry-shrink into his mouth, but the execution is very uncanny. Like I don’t buy that it opens or closes like a regular mouth, it just seems like it’d be open forever, an endless scream, a wound bleeding purple. Not really the most reassuring thing you’d want to see during therapy, in my opinion! Anyway, I’d like to imagine that the genesis of this strip was the writer being told by a therapist “You are loveless but not unloveable!” and instead of applying this insight towards solving her various emotional problems she decided to draw a cartoon about talking Uncurstables® sandwiches instead.

Gil Thorp, 12/12/24

“The catch is made by … Milford?” really makes it sound like Marty Moon has never heard of an “interception” before. “Goshen threw it … but Milford caught it? Is that legal?” [desperately paging through the rulebook]

Shoe, 12/12/24

We all know, of course, that women be shopping. But what if I told you … that in the year 2024 … they be shopping … on the computer.

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Mary Worth, 11/27/24

Oh, man, this is incredible, we’re now on day three of Mary’s dinner guests making it very clear that they don’t mind at all that dinner’s been cancelled, and then going off and doing the thing that they’re now free to do because dinner’s been cancelled while very much not worrying about whether Mary’s dying or whatever. In Dr. Jeff’s case, the thing that he’s now free to do is to take a brisk walk alone into the woods and never come back.

Shoe, 11/27/24

Normally it would be the guy delivering the gag who would get the heavy lidded expression of despair in the second panel, indicating his shame at delivering terrible Shoe-level wordplay. But that’s not the case here, which leads me to believe this guy isn’t making a joke or anything. He’s dead serious about it: the toilet seat thing is a sick sex thing, one that drives his wife wild with desire, and it’s no doubt just the beginning of some very elaborate process that you do not want to know about. Shoe’s right to look so angry about having to hear this.

Pluggers, 11/27/24

Hey, pluggers, you guys know that they give the mall Santas a wig and a fake beard, right? It’s pretty obvious when you look at them. Even the little kids can tell, for the most part.