Disappointment after disappointment
Post Content
Pluggers, 6/18/25
“Wrongo!” my brain basically shouted at me the moment I read this panel. “Pluggers would not shop at Trader Joe’s, which is for young, hip urbanites! They would obviously choose Aldi’s side in the Brothers War!” But upon reflection, I’m not actually sure if that’s true. Trader Joe’s is a relatively cheap grocery store with whimsical decor. Sure, lots of people my age like it, but, let’s be real: I am beginning my sixth decade on this planet and that is prime plugger age. Many pluggers probably enjoy their various products! Certainly the ones in California! One must learn to adjust one’s knee-jerk opinions in the face of evidence, lest one become a plugger oneself.
Marvin, 6/18/25
It honestly would be pretty bleak if the “I [HEART] DADDY” mug that Jeff is drinking out of had actually been picked out for him by the son that he’s currently in the process of demonstrating his boundless contempt for. Fortunately, Marvin actually fully reciprocates this loathing; the mug was no doubt purchased by Jenny — not, sadly, as a sex thing, but rather in a last-ditch attempt to forge a bond between her husband and her son, neither of whom she feels particularly warmly towards herself.
The Lockhorns, 6/18/25
Aw, man, Leroy looks kind of sad here. He was honestly looking forward to getting all elaborately dressed up, burning some steaks, and then serving them up drenched in hard liquor for him and Loretta to eat outside together. But I guess yet another attempt to have a good time with his wife has failed to live up to her standards.
111 replies to “Disappointment after disappointment”
Let’s see what we have in today’s pick…. comics about shitting, comics about the shitter, alcoholism. Nothing surprising
MW: Mary, you damnable liar. You know for a fact that Wilbur Weston has never once in his life acknowledged that he’s made a mistake, let alone owned up to it. The only reason God doesn’t smite you right here for such a falsehood is because you’re already doomed to hell, where you’ll go on dates with Wilbur at his worst for all of eternity. And the whole time, he’ll be wearing the Speedo.
Glad to see you’re doing well, Josh!
Lockhorns: Loretta has been the poster child for Carnation Instant Bitch since 1977.
Marvin: Jeff, you voted for late term abortions because you thought that was an easy way to off Marvin without getting a murder charge, right?
MW: Mary has only been here for two days but she’s already making herself punchable. Thankfully for her, Dawn is as stupid as she is spineless.
Lockhorns: Loretta says it’s straight bourbon, but it looks like black tar on her finger.
Sure, if you want to make a good meat sauce, you might be tempted to choose a straight Bourbon, like Louis XIV. But real connoisseurs knows you put your money on a queer Bourbon, like Philip the Duke of Orléans
Jeff has given up all hopes for his son even though he is not even two-year old. It’s sad, but it is even sadder that he’s right to do so
@Ettorre: Damn you. Beat me to it (although your formulation of straight v. queer Bourbon is funnier than I was going to be).
Pluggers: Of course I went to the Trader Joe’s website, and of course, they show no search results for prunes.
Also: The Brothers’ War? I guess we’re just waiting around until someone ends it by detonating the Grocery Sylex, leading to a new global ice age, which honestly would probably be an improvement.
LOCKHORNS: No shade? No shade at all? Geez, L & L, plant a couple of trees, and install some kind of patio umbrella until they grow. No point in getting heat stroke as you snipe at each other.
MW: The contempt with which Mary says Dirk there…
Is Marvin’s dad so full of contempt for people because he thinks they’re fooled by his comb over and doesn’t understand the concept of politeness?
***
A profile in plugger poop pathologies.
@Voshko: Nice to meet you!
I love how Moy is trying to make the audience compare Wilbur and Dawn’s failed relationships as though they were the same thing. The only thing that they have in common is that they both ended in ways where neither of them faced any consequences. Dawn just slinked off after assaulting Dirk with a bowling ball and Wilbur was fully absolved of any wrongdoing thanks to the Brother ex Machina. Dawn was actually abused by her partner but Wilbur was arguably the abusive party considering Belle’s mental state but it wouldn’t be his first or last time as the abusive party in any of his relationships.
Some Plugger experiences are universal — not shitting enough, worrying about shitting, eating for shitting — but how do local conditions affect Pluggers, for example on the culture war and partisanship? Are California Pluggers more laid-back and tolerant than heartland Pluggers, in line with the progressive tilt of the state? Or are California Pluggers fully radicalised by being unable to affect policies of the state, despite there being millions of them, many more than in most red states? Are their intestines the only thing building up pressure, before a tragic and violent explosion?
The bowl of bourbon is the clear indicator that Loretta should have been even more suspicious that Leroy was grilling at 7 A.M. Leroy braces for the talk. Again.
Blondie: “Hard-hitting news”?
Beetle Bailey: General Halftrack’s golf outfit?
I’ve slipped thru a wormhole to 1965. Or both of there are doing the Family Circus rerun bit.
@Potee:
….and I just laughed coffee up my nose. Again.
We know that both Leroy and Loretta are terrible at preparing food, why don’t they just eat out? Oh, right, they are banned from every restaurant in town for making a scene in public!
Side note, I hope people have reloaded the page and aren’t still posting on yesterday, this could get super odd.
Pluggers – Easy in and easy out, if ya know what I mean….
Marvin – An immovable feast….
Shlockhorns – And cheap straight bourbon at that – in your honor, Old Crow….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
Leroy’s plan to dramatically self immolate by pouring a bowlful high proof alcohol over a lit barbecue, thereby ending himself in a way calculated to cause maximum inconvenience for Loretta, has been foiled. It’s not a happy relationship by any stretch, but at least they thwart each other’s more self destructive tendancies, even if it is only out of spite.
Pluggers: A few plugger complaints about Trader Joe’s:
— “If they call it Two-Buck Chuck, how come it costs three dollars?!”
— “What do you mean, that product was ‘seasonal’? I just bought some last week!”
— “If those potato chips are ‘organic and healthy,’ how come I gained three pounds?”
— “If this chocolate is ‘organic and healthy,’ how come I gained five pounds?”
— “The checkout clerk was extremely nice and chatty with me. Are you sure they don’t want to be my friend?”
— “How is it that it takes me just as long to get out of the parking lot as it took me to get in?!”
(Yes, in this particular situation, I am also a plugger.)
Marvin: Ha, this toddler is boring, and his father despises him!
The Lockhorns: C’mon, Leroy, you have to add brown sugar to the bourbon for proper caramelization! (Then your sauce will actually be better than anything you can buy in the store. And you can compete in barbecue showdowns every weekend, and you’ll never have to spend time with your wife again!)
Marvin: Don they put that shit bag on a pedestal or something? Is there a guardrail around the stage he’s on?
MW-Like owning up to the mistake of making people think Wilbur was dead?
@Poteet: They figure they get all the shade they need by throwing it at each another.
Seattle Times comics page has been coming up blank since yesterday afternoon, so I had to resort to ComicsKingdom with no subscription. When did the interface transition from awful to nigh-unusable?
JP: Hah, we called it! Hello, remote goat farm! Hope you girls packed your “mud” galoshes.
New Adventure! Farewell, attractive teens in bathing suits! Ghost-Who-Skulks is….skulking.
GT: Thorpe, Jr., really does have a great collection of novelty earrings, YES?
Marvin: I don’t comprehend the idea that one can be this brutally critical of a toddler (even if the toddler in question displays distinctly non-toddler characteristics). I can (barely) understand the contempt on display in Dustin. That title character has grown up to be a massive disappointment, which may or may not be due to his traumatic upbringing. Still, I think even Ed Kudlick wasn’t an asshole to Dustin, aged 2(?).
@Potee: Looks like my keyboar is acting up again.
Blondie-Dagwood reads the comics first to get ready for the daily Comics Curmudgeon post.
Mary Worth is cutting the roses Mortica Addams style. Soon she’ll have a nice bowl of stems.
@Liam: In Wilbur’s mind, it was okay to let everyone think that he was dead because they would have wanted him to have fun on a resort and it would be such a good surprise. Because obviously it’s not Wilbur’s job to have empathy for others.
Lockhorns: I’ve got two reasons that Leroy is a Guy From Harlem! He likes burnt steaks and shitty Scotch, er, bourbon.
MARVIN: To be fair, Jeff, I think Marvin falling off of that high table you guys plopped him on unsecured and unsupervised would count as an “activity.”
GT: I guess Milford is using their ambidextrous pitcher (southpaw on the Saturday strip, orthodox thereafter) facing a switch hitter! He was batting right handed yesterday when he took a ball, and is now batting left handed. Do comic strips have a continuity editor?
DT: I vaguely remember this – someone was trying to use a time drone to manipulate stock prices but got blown up. Was that in the same building?
MW: The writer miscalculated the response. Wilbur can’t ever truly learn or become insightful. He is among the best characters in the strip!
RMMD: Please let this be a convoluted scheme! Meanwhile Rex is wondering, “when are we going to eat cake!”
GA: “Look, that large basketful eggs were given to us free, so don’t feel bad about them being broken… why is Rover selling his farm?”
LOCKHORNS: Maybe Loretta likes her sauce made with rum. Reminds her of that Carribean vacation she’s never, ever going on.
Today’s comic about how Marvin never does anything is oddly juxtaposed with the recent comic about how Marvin was inexplicably playing Little League, which made me think that the Marvin comic needs to pick a lane and stay in it, but then I remembered what Marvin’s lane actually is, so I decided I’d prefer that the comic swerve all over the proverbial road.
@Ukulele Ike: Seattle Times is working fine for me.
JP: Maybe they’re stealing “The Simpsons” plot from a few years ago where Bart was sent to France and wound up doing menial work on a vineyard.
GT: I’ve been a baseball fan all of my life. I have NO idea what’s going on here.
Pluggers: This is clearly a drug deal, right? Why else would a Chicken Lady with a basket full of unpurchased groceries be hunched over and handing the baggie of “prunes” to a Dogbear Lady whose groceries are already bagged and paid for? “I think Trader Joe’s are great” can only be a code phrase.
Not surprising to see a plugger from a town whose “rural roots influenced its motto ‘The City in the Country'” and that is now a San Diego exurb with a median household income of $143,825. Chief Plugger probably changed it to Trader Joe’s from Whole Foods.
Pluggers – Nope. Josh is wrong. Trader Joe’s is too hoity-toity for pluggers. Even Costco is too fancy. It’s Sam’s Club all the way.
Arlo & Janis – I have an uncomfortable feeling about the recent trips down Memory Lane. I hope this isn’t leading to the retirement of this strip.
FC – This one goes back to the days of forcing kids to kiss repellent people they don’t want to go near. Fortunately, many parents are starting to become more enlightened about this terrible practice.
Frazz – The little genius is humming the theme to -gasp! – a movie franchise instead of quoting ancient Roman poets?!
Rex Morgan – They’re going to spend the rest of the week discussing whether they should insure the package of spit when they mail it.
FC: Kiss her? We wish! She’s the one who sexually molests us!
MW: Mary, Wilbur, and Karen Moy are tag-team gaslighting Dawn at this point. Mary with this set of obvious falsehoods, Wilbur with his phony humility, and Karen Moy by continuing to conceal the fact that Wilbur’s “mistake” should have gotten Dawn killed.
Pluggers: Another strip that is made more believable by adding the phrase “and you’re a smug jackass about it” to the caption.
Frazz: Again, if turning all your homework lets you leave for the year, why didn’t this self-proclaimed super genius leave months ago?
Luann: If anything, Luann should eat out more.
Pluggers: Damn, Henrietta. You’re a chicken. You already shit while you walk. Why amp it up with prunes?
MW: I think there’s enough material here for a reality show based on “The Dating Game” in which Dawn and Wilbur search for love and, concealed behind a screen, spin their personal stories to attract unsuspecting potential dates. Mary would be the show’s moderator.
Mary Worth Mashup: Which is the more likely missing final panel?
@Charterstoned: They’d just end up with each other.
Not sure of the Community’s opinion in general, but is anybody else half as pissed off at this Frazz story arc as me? It makes NO sense. No teacher can end a term early. What does all your homework turned in even mean? Did Olsen catalogue every single assignment? Could you have done assignments from lessons you hadn’t received yet early? Did the shithead writing this never go to elementary school? Why is Adult Calvin, Janitor happy the school year is ending, doesn’t that mean he had to have hung on to his regular pay for his summer of M/D 20/20 and meth?
@Banana Jr. 6000: It’s okay for Dawn to be abused by the people she loves but not by some overly aggressive pushy guy who got his relationship tips from 2004 negs or by her mother who probably “abused” her by taking her to museums and the theatre rather than sing bad karaoke and grind on older men.
Lalo Y Lola Spanish to English.
@Sequitur: I am horrified to realize how well that works, including the big smiles.
@Banana Jr. 6000: Maybe so, but they’d ALSO win some fabulous prizes! Johnny, what have we got?
@A Grave Mind: I don’t even have to read it. It’s like I’m there. Eww.
@Charterstoned: Boxing Wilbur Babies with mullets that were cut by a weed whacker.
@A Grave Mind: Being pissed off at a Frazz story is the default position for me. It’s one of my hate reads.
I think that you are right that a teacher doesn’t have the authority to let kids go home early. I thought that school management set dismissal times. Around here the last day of school is a half day, and everyone is aware of it.
I don’t understand the turning in homework thing, either. Wouldn’t the teacher give the student a zero if he doesn’t turn in the homework when it’s due? Does the student have an open ended opportunity to turn in the homework late and get points for it? That doesn’t made sense.
Thank you for noting the Calvin resemblance. Mallett’s ripoff of Bill Watterson’s artistic style is a sore point with me.
@taig: Ooooh, snap!
@Voshko: Bwahaha!
@Anonymous: Some of us need to remember to USE our keyboars.
Beetle Bailey-“Well then what are you wearing?”
LUANN: It’s not just that a character who is forever nineteen but has taken nine years of college classes and STILL can’t find a job that isn’t toilet-cleaning or tutoring the alphabet isn’t credible. It’s that presenting such a deeply stupid character year after year is enraging to some of us, meaning me. DIE LUANN DIE DIE DIE NOW DIE NOW
@I speak Jive:
Would this storyline make more sense/be better if Mrs Olsen was forcing CAUFIELD to stay AFTER class is done to hand in all the homework assignments he never did over the school year, and the insufferable “little genius” came up with an elaborate heist-like plot to hand in all his homework BEFORE the last day of school starts, so that he can force Mrs Olsen to send him home early instead?
…Nah, it probably wouldn’t…Pluggers – Allow me to school you on Aldi, Trader Joe’s, and Prunes. Aldi sells theirs in a cardboard cannister with a lid. The clear zip packaging shown there is pure TJ’s. Now, at Costco, they come in a five pound yellow plastic bag with a zip.
I am a Plugger. I shop at both Aldi and Trader Joe’s, and I like prunes.
Luann: I feel like Luann and Dawn Weston overlap far too much as codependent co-eds who have an abusive figure in their lives (Luann has Bernice, Dawn has Wilbur) that the audience is supposed to believe cares about them but in reality would sell them in human trafficking in order to get their own bathroom.
MW: “Belle left” is such a hilarious way to describe what actually happened. “Belle tried to poison me, twice, almost swallowed a live fish, attacked us with a spoon and was whisked away by her Wilbur-doppelganger brother” is just too many words for Dawnie?
@Baja Gaijin: The second one is more likely. It’s possible Dirk did something other than missionary.
AGM: Pay attention to your choice of words. Not everyone is entertained by derogatory slurs.
@Astroboy: Saying a McDonald’s order is too many words for Dawn.
Crank: Oh, boy, my favourite kind of Crankshaft strip; the kind where I can’t even tell what the word he’s mangling is supposed to be! Is it “scaffold”? Even Ed couldn’t have got “scapula” out of “scaffold”, surely?
(Or maybe it’s not a malapropism and the structure they’re walking under is irrelevant. “They say this city’s got less violent crime than it used to, but if that’s true, why are there all these shoulder blades lying around the place?”)
DT: Okay, I guess Not Lovejoy (or is he?? Once you introduce time travel, alibis cease to actually mean anything) isn’t using a Science Gadget to produce exact duplicates of paintings and then letting the cops find the duplicate while he sells the original to unscrupulous collectors — he’s moving the paintings through time and … that does something, I guess? (I hope it’s not the same plan but with temporal duplicates, because that would be even stupider.)
JP: Hey, remember yesterday’s strip when Reena asked if there was any way to check if their alleged driver wasn’t just some guy who knew their names somehow? What happened between then and now, Sophie saying “No, not at all, but I’m sure it’ll be fine”?
MW: “I think your father’s the type who can own up to his mistakes … as long as he’s immediately told that nobody really blames him or considers him at fault in any way! That is, in fact, what he considers to be the whole point of owning up to your mistakes. If you hadn’t done that, he’d have had a massive hissy fit, but I’m sure you realise that, since you’re the one who has to live with him.”
OTF: Speaking of stretching things too thin, the more Holbrook elaborates on this metaphor of workplace anxiety as a finite resource that can’t affect people in the office and people working from home at the same time, the more chance everyone has to think “That’s not how any of this works.” Today, even the visual metaphor is incoherent, with workplace anxiety being “stretched too thin” by getting thinner without stretching.
Pluggers, meta: I don’t know why I’m vaguely surprised that you have Aldi in America. It just feels like there’s something fundamentally British about it, even though I already knew it was German.
(My favourite take on Aldi was a Jasper Fforde novel that claimed the chain [and similar chain Lidl] were actually founded in a parallel universe where capitalism works differently and supermarkets simply don’t jack their prices as high as possible. This is also why they’re full of items that look like brands, but that you’ve never actually heard of before.)
S4th: Oh, did you think the introduction of Jill and Alan would mean an end to “all of the Forths’ neighbours hate them”? Nope, now it’s just “almost all of the Forths’ neighbours hate them”!
MW: Meanwhile, as Dawn chats with Mary, Wilbur is at the local box store shopping for an extra-large-sized jar of mayonnaise when he meets a woman….
@A Grave Mind: I can imagine the teacher ending class a little early on the last day of school, but that’s about it. (My own public high school basically did this, despite having an infamously strict ‘closed campus’ policy.)
The biggest problem with the story is what I said above; why is Unappreciated Genius still hanging around? Caulfield is exactly who the teacher invents a “anyone who submits their homework can leave early” scheme to get rid of.
Don Abundio, translated:
“Don Abundio’s been displeased with us lately”
“He’s a terrible employer, but no one else would hire us!”
“We’d better be extra obsequious for a while”
“Yeah, I guess so”
“But all this groveling is hard on the knees!”
MW: I would think a normal person would be dying to mention that Belle’s brother is her dad’s doppelganger.
Maybe Dawn just wanted to cruelly deprive Mary of all the juicy details Mary would so love to have heard.
If that’s the case, I’m on Team Dawn.
@Astroboy: As if Mary needs more ways to slut shame Dawn from her multiple boyfriends to wearing shorts.
Pluggers – This strip has been around since 1993, and in 30 years it went from Greatest Generation to suburbanized Gen-Xers as its core audience. Nostalgia for the 1960s has passed, and its creeping closer to nostalgia for the 1990s being the basis for Plugger identity.
Marvin – Tom Armstrong is about the receive a cease-and-desist from Jim Davis for stealing a Garfield joke.
The Lockhorns – LeRoy has sampled some (okay, quite a bit) of his barbecue sauce, and the alcohol has lowered his emotional defenses. Maybe the shrink was right, he self-sabotages even his desired hobbies like cooking because he wants negative engagement from Loretta. It’s better than apathy or the fear of being alone.
@I speak Jive: It’s maddening to try to make sense of Frazz, but for years now *some* school districts have been moving towards no-deadline and/or multiple-retake policies across the board. If Mrs Olsen was caught in some hell of the school forcing her to give no homework deadlines (and therefore potentially have to grade *everything* in a rush at the end), I could understand her wanting to say that if done, school’s out, the rest of you finish it up. But there’s no way this is some smart commentary on the trade-offs of such grading policies.
@Banana Jr. 6000:
Again, would the story make more sense if this was a “Everyone can leave class early if all their homework for the year is handed in… except if it’s not, you have to stay in class until ALL of it is handed in, you’ll stay AFTER class if that’s what it takes” was instead something to specifically PUNISH CAUFIELD and only him, with the “little genius” having to see all his classmates leave early while he’ll be stuck in class for the entire evening, at least (because Caufield, thinking that Mrs Olsen’s assignments are tedious and boring and “beneath him”, hasn’t done/handed in a single one).
And Caufield comes up with this zany scheme to break into the school and deliver all his (freshly-done) homework on Mrs Olsen’s desk BEFORE the last day of school even starts, so she HAS to let him go early (with the incongruity that Caufield put MORE effort in handing in his homework doing it this way than he would have done simply doing his homework on time during the year an intentional source of “comedy”).
…Yeah, speaking of putting more effort into something than it’s worth….Periodic surveys over the years have consistently found that The Lockhorns is the favorite strip of Detroit Free Press readers. Which seems to imply something about the state of matrimony among my fellow Michiganders. Which I may have subconsciously picked up on, explaining why I’m still single at this late stage in life.
@taig: I have a feeling sex with Dirk is either missionary or “Give me a blow job. Now.” Followed by him rolling over and snoring.
I’m reminded of Carole Lombard’s well-known comment about sex with Clark Gable. “Poppa is…not so great in the sack.” Well, no. Why should he bother working at it? He’s Clark Gable. Take a number, girls.
@A Grave Mind: Frazz is independently wealthy and spends his summers inexplicably hanging around with the kids during their vacation times. I’d like to propose an alternative story line in which he crashes his mountain bike in a ravine in June and spends the next three months dragging himself and his two broken legs to civilization while eating lizards to survive.
C’shft: That’s right, every major city is a dystopian hellhole. Unaccountable destruction is more your style, construction, not so much. If you’re lucky, you may catch some street theater; masked thugs kidnapping a mother as evidence of how violent cities have become.
@Majicou: My wife gets Trader Joe’s prunes when they’re out of their excellent & reasonably priced figs. Yes, we’re Pluggers, dagnabbit & damn you kids!
@Downpuppy: I guess I stand corrected. Maybe their website just isn’t very good.
Swamp: Remember this if you are ever in a situation where you DON’T want to be picked.
To be fair to Jeff, I can only imagine how he must feel after having to deal with Marvin’s poo for… (looks up start date for the comic strip)… 43 years… yeah, I’d be seething with contempt too.
@Anonymous #77: Yours is also a good take on the underlying premise.
@Dr. Larry Erhardt:
IS that his deal? Ummmm, ick. Love your story idea, but how does a guy with two broken legs catch lizards? Nononono. It’s the Rock Slime/Own Urine Diet Time!
@Dr. Larry Erhardt: @A Grave Mind: You boys are the kindly type, I reckon. I want to see healthy hiking Frazz jammed between two boulders and chewing off his own leg to escape. Better yet, stuck in a cave squeeze a hundred feet below the surface for a couple of weeks, like Floyd Collins.
Happy 100th anniversary, dead Floyd Collins!
Mark Trail Mix: Giant raccoon is laughing at the superior intellect!
I genuinely laughed at the Marvin comic. But then, it’s been a long day.
I see Marvin has just become Garfield, with grown humans standing stiffly in a void containing only a vague surface for the short character to sit upon to stay in frame.
Sex Organ, V.D.:No one hears the tiny scraping at the window of Room 12,as the squirrel squeaks out “Daddy?”,while grasping a DNA testing nut in his paw.
@Needless Exposition: LUANN: I feel like Luann and Dawn Weston overlap far too much as codependent co-eds who have an abusive figure in their lives (Luann has Bernice, Dawn has Wilbur) that the audience is supposed to believe cares about them but in reality would sell them in human trafficking in order to get their own bathroom.
Having read the Luann strip for 7/30/2020, I’d say Bernice is fully justified in going that far for her own bathroom. And I say that as someone who normally despises Bernice.
@GarrisonSkunk:
Right? I wanna have a sit-down with the Mark Trail people. Could tell ’em, “Guys, I know drugs are fun. But c’mon, a lot of people SEE this.”
Also, for the editor guy, isn’t this, llike, exactly what Wired does? I don’t know if they take freelance, but maybe address this?
Don’t Flash Gordon: Bok flashes back to his last viewing of “Yellow Submarine” (video removed by MegaCorp, Belle Battsfree, Pres.)
“Look! A Cyclops!” “Cant be, he’s got two eyes!” ” Ok, a biCyclops! There’s another! And another! A whole Cyclopedia!”
Pluggers: Today I learned more than I wanted to know about Debbie Nordstrom of Poway, California’s bowel regularity.
@Bryan: And Bernice getting her own bathroom means she can take her time getting out whatever bug she has up her ass constantly.
@A Grave Mind: Also, doesn’t Mark Trail WORK for a magazine? I thought his whole job was to write stories about animals for Woods and Wildlife. Or did that change when the strip became 1990s Hipster Mark Trail?
@Banana Jr. 6000:
That’s been seriously unclear for me, too, though I kinda stop and start with MT. Wasn’t the magazine online-only now, and he was no longer salary, or something (realistic)? Yes, I’m confused he’s in regular contact with an editor who probably would’ve been replaced, but, well, Mark Trail sucks.
@Ukulele Ike: #88: I’d prefer to see Frazz chased by as ravenous bear, having to cut small pieces of his flesh off with a knife and tossing them on the ground to slow the bear down. Better yet, he tosses Caulfield to the pack of wolves to save his own skin.
The sad thing is that there’s more warmth and affection between Loretta and LeRoy than between Jenny and whatsisname or Dustmom and Dustdad. There’s a difference between sparring partners who are in it for the rage sex and people who have figured out how to make pressure cookers of their own ennui.
@Guillermo el Chiclero: If that happens, let me know. I axed Frazz from my daily list back in April. Just can’t take that crap any more.
Luann: Are we meant to believe that Luann pays for anything to do with the car? That brings my suspension of disbelief to the breaking point.
@Needless Exposition: I’d say attempted poisoning is abuse.
I mean, I wouldn’t excuse her actions because she’s mentally ill. (Speaking as a Schizophrenic myself) What if she literally grabbed a knife and stabbed both of them right there? Poisoning is no better, as someone is still at risk of dying and that is not something to give an “endearing quirks” slap on the wrist for.
@Needless Exposition: Also, how did Wilbur abuse Belle? He never harmed her, in fact he spoke very calmly and rationally when she tried to eat Willa.
The only thing that he did was refuse to eat her (obviously poisoned) food.
@Ukulele Ike: I might have been giving Dirk a little too much credit there. It’s still more plausible than Dawn working on a revenge plan. She is no “The Bride.”
@The Rambling Otter: It wouldn’t have been abuse on Wilbur’s part if they didn’t reveal the whole thing about Avery and Belle not being in the right state of mind. By saying that she’s so mentally unstable that she needs medication and constant supervision, it calls her ability to consent to their clearly sexual relationship.
@The Rambling Otter: My problem is that both Belle and Wilbur were given a free pass thanks to Avery showing up. It’s like saying that her crimes are okay because her current state of mind is being called into question rather than her mental state when she was trying to poison Dawn.
Oh, it was the danger that attracted Dawn to Dirk, and Wilbur to Belle? That was not at any point apparent in the text. Wilbur was clearly 100% oblivious to Belle’s obessive-compulsive murder disease, and while Dirk showed some worrying controlling behavior Dawn didn’t seem to be “into” getting told to get better at eating food as much as “fuming under quiet protest but putting up with it cause she couldn’t find a polite way to extricate herself from her asshole date.”
Maybe the joke is that a Mary Worth storyline about unhealthy relationships struggles because the baseline for relationships in the comic is already so unhealthy. Haha?
I wouldn’t call Wilbur’s actions toward Belle “abuse.” I think “exploitation” is more accurate. As others have said, the revelation of Belle’s mental state makes Wilbur’s entire relationship with her highly questionable.
@Needless Exposition: True -nods-