Mary Worth, 2/26/15
Welp, looks like next year’s Worthy Awards will be a mere formality, as today’s final panel, in which a wild-eyed Amy waves her fist in the air to indicate just how jazzed she is to be marrying a rich dude who will allow her to quit her job, will clearly sweep every category. (I certainly hope she’s also making barking noises like the “dog pound” from the Arsenio Hall Show.) Hanna is happy too, because Dave’s riches have bought Amy access to both time to personally care for her child and hired help to care for her child when she wants to use her time for something else! No more babysitting for Hanna! Also, Dave can buy Gordon all the screens he wants so he never has to look any of his family members in the eye ever again!
I really thought that this storyline had another twist in store, but it’s Thursday and Hanna’s self-satisfied thought balloon has me thinking that this is the plot-wrapping-up week, and we’re going to end with both Amy and Hanna having solved their problems by finding and marrying the right dudes. My only regret is that the whole thing didn’t end in a Shakespeare-comedy style double wedding at City Hall, with Gordon playing the “holy fool” character (a modern version who just stares vacantly at a Gameboy the entire time).
Family Circus, 2/26/15
Dolly looks at a set of rigid metal pipes of varying sizes bound together forever and only capable of producing noise in response to the breath of some vastly larger being and sees a “family,” which tells us a disturbing amount about her own take on her home life.
Momma, 2/25/15
Momma usually wrings laughs from the wildly imbalanced nature of the relationship between Momma and her adult children: she wants them closer, despite the fact that they’re all kind of terrible, and she herself is terrible to them in various ways, and they pull away. If that doesn’t sound funny to you, then congrats on being a decent human being, but to the extent that the conceit works, it works because Momma is cartoonishly terrible and not at all self-reflective. That’s why today’s panel three, in which Momma watches her fleeing son and poignantly reflects on her own unbearableness, is definitely one of the more depressing things the newspaper comics have to offer today.
The Lockhorns, 2/25/15
The self-loathing both halves of the Lockhorns feel is an integral part of this feature’s shtick, of course. Leroy wants so badly to disappear into comforting nothingness that he can’t even bring himself to photograph his own face.
Mark Trail, 2/25/15
You know who doesn’t go through a bunch of agonized self-reflection, ever? Wolves! Wolves feel really quite good about themselves and their totally rad ability to form an awesome, bad-ass pack and just straight up eat a whole moose. Old Ripper becomes the first Mark Trail animal to get a name other than “Lucky” that I can remember, though like the old mother moose, Ripper is old, because you have to respect the strip’s animal-identification traditions.
Mary Worth, 2/24/15
Ha ha, whoops, when I said that Amy couldn’t possibly also be getting married because that would be “too obvious,” I forgot that “too obvious” is Mary Worth’s bread and butter. It’s not entirely clear if Amy really is engaged to Dave, or if she’s just letting her mother think so in order to show how ridiculous it is to rush into marriage so quickly, but one thing’s for certain: Gordon does have a new sitter, and it’s that little handheld gadget he’s blissfully staring into in panel one! Gordon’s love for the soothing television screen is well-known, and now he has one he can fit into his pocket wherever he goes! He doesn’t need Hanna anymore! He doesn’t need anybody.
Spider-Man, 2/24/15
This whole Spidey-fight (the proportional fight … of a spider) has pretty blissfuly ignored the laws of physics so far, but this triumphant conclusion, in which Spider-Man saves their lives by having them plummet not into concrete but into a foot of water in a concrete-lined fountain, really takes the cake. Mysterio shooting him in the chest at point-blank range would be a fitting way to end this, although it would raise the question of why he didn’t just do that to begin with.
Six Chix, 2/24/15
Hey, sexually self-actualized she-bear, I’m … not sure this is how population explosions work? Look, if you want to shun monogamy and play the field, you be you, just don’t try to come up with some transparently dumb evo-psych sociobiological justification for it.
Dennis the Menace, 2/24/15
Dennis, unable to fully grasp that other people can truly have feelings or an inner life, sees them merely as walking meat puppets whose parts are in occasional need of repair. Menacing factor: high.
