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Mary Worth, 10/2/23

Do you think Mary aggressively pesters new Charterstone residents to accept her casserole-based hospitality because she wants them to feel welcome? Oh, you sweet summer child. No, her main goal is to get inside their apartment and engage them in seemingly casual chit-chat to see if either reveals a potential entry point for hard-core meddling. A lot of times it doesn’t work out, but do you sees Mary’s eyes here?

Normally that’s the kind of expression you’d expect when seeing an addict in the throes of a high after taking a big hit of their favorite drug, and in a way you’re correct. Mary is straight-up mainlining a surprise dose of Complicated Family Situation That May Benefit From Advice From An Outside Party, and I hope her heart can handle it.

Blondie, 10/2/23

Sorry, Blondie, you came so close to convincing me that you’re created by “real Americans” who enjoy NFL football, but then you got to “unemployment team” and your metaphor completely foundered. If one of your players sucks, you can just cut them from the team! You don’t have to trade them to anybody! If they’re as incompetent as Dagwood, probably no other team would want them!

The Lockhorns, 10/2/23

Leroy and Loretta live in a quintessential suburban neighborhood, but given Leroy’s Jets fandom and rail commute, I always assumed they were in Long Island, probably an older tract in Nassau County or maybe even outer Queens. Does this track with him apparently being a Nets fan? I was going to say that the Nets are kind of johnny-come-latelies to New York, but they moved from New Jersey 11 years ago, and since I firmly believe that the Lockhorns are millennials, that’s probably plenty long enough for Leroy to have committed himself to them. I’ll leave the final call here to New York-area readers, but I do want to add that in order for this joke to really land, we need to understand those shorts as being the big baggy kind that extend well past the knee, something difficult to depict on a gnomish creature like Leroy Lockhorn.

Pluggers, 10/2/23

They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but I think headlines like “Dozens of simple, down-home working-class Americans die after incorrectly parsing Pluggers panel” will not do this feature any favors.

Six Chix, 10/2/23

I dunno, given that these two functionally identical panels have a number of differences in detail showing that the second panel was mostly redrawn, I’m going to say that artist brought far more of herself to the job today than she really needed to.