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Mary Worth, 7/30/24

A recurring question that arises in the increasingly Wilbur-focused era of Mary Worth we find ourselves in is: are we getting so much Wilbur because we’re expected to like and support him, or are we being repeatedly shown his worst humiliations, in order to create a strip that is nothing more than his personal hell? I’ve had my doubts, but today’s strip, in which Wilbur tells an incredulous fish that he communicated with another dead fish in a dream, and then we smash cut to Wilbur’s ex, whom Wilbur named the dead fish after, in the midst of an extremely erotic canoodle with her handsome boyfriend, certainly seems to point in one direction fairly strongly.

Blondie, 7/30/24

Blondie absolutely loves a “what’s a universal, non-controversial cultural touchstone of the moment we can do extremely lazy jokes about,” and obviously the Olympics are the pinnacle of that sort of thing, with the added advantage that they last for weeks. Yesterday we had a mildly funny joke about Dagwood getting in trouble for streaming the Olympics on his phone during a work meeting, but I’m actually kind of appalled by today’s strip, which seems to imply that Olympic runners have their performance scored by judges rather than simply being timed to see who finishes the event the fastest.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/30/24

I love it when a work of art sparks a conversation, raising not one but multiple questions about its characters and its world. For instance, today’s Snuffy Smith has me asking “Doesn’t ‘busking’ usually happen on a sidewalk in a big city? Why is Jughaid doing it out in the middle of an open field somewhere” but also “Doesn’t Jughaid wear that stupid hat all the time? Does Ol’ Bullet repeatedly attack him when he does, and if so why don’t we get to see it more often?”

Shoe, 7/30/24

Ha ha! A laugh track, get it? Because his political promises are laughable! Good one! Say, does anyone involved in the creation of Shoe know what a “website” is and how one works? Like have they ever used the internet, at all?