Speaking affectionately ill of the dead
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Dick Tracy, 5/16/25
The current Dick Tracy story wrapped up with our criminals fleeing from the cops and in the process conveniently getting into a terrible car accident that killed our beloved dipshit nephews and their comically cursing aunt. I guess all’s well that ends well, and by “ends well” we mean “ends with three corpses in the very morgue where, for reasons that have still not been adequately explained, this caper began.” By the way, do the dimensions on those corpses seem off to you? Like they’re unusually tall, right? Not sure I want to know what exactly happened in that car accident.
Dennis the Menace, 5/16/25
Wow, look at how angrily Mr. Wilson is sucking on that spoon in the background there, trying to get every particle and calorie that’s been permitted to him. He’s very hungry! He’s an old man, please just let him eat what he wants!
Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/16/25
Oh, so you think Rex Morgan, M.D., storylines are “boring” and “pointless” and “nothing ever exciting happens in them, why is this even in the newspaper?” Well, have you considered that if they were exciting, it would be very scary for the characters? Would you want to live in an exciting storyline? I didn’t think so!
135 replies to “Speaking affectionately ill of the dead”
DT: “So, now, what do we do with this truck the killer bequeathed us?”
DtM: And here I thought George was comically vaping.
RMMD:
“…although sometimes, just for a little excitement and a bit of a change of pace, I put Snowball in a computerized tomography machine and give her a ‘CAT’ scan!”
Dennis the Menace: Mister Wilson is on the “metal eating” diet, which is why he is so intense. It’s hard for those old dentures to saw through iron, but George Wilson is determined!
DT: “I have my family’s fate on my conscience, already. I never should have turned them into human centipedes.”
RMMD:
“Michelle, have you ever considered offering your cat up for a bit part in the currently popular musical Hadestown?”
“Not a Snowball’s chance in hell!”
DT: The coroner waxes nostalgic upon seeing three criminal bodies in the morgue. “If this keeps up maybe we can reopen the Tracy wing.” He thinks.
DT – Only the dead have seen the end of war…I mean at least they’ve got that going for them….
DtM – George has been on a 30 day diet – a diet of Worms. They still haven’t ended serfdom….
RMMD – YES! The grueling, meaningless life uneventful!! That’s the ticket!!!
Adios Amigos, DJ.
MW: Mary is actually a teeny, weeny bit disgusted by Wilbur! “Could it be that he’s NOT just a delightfully quirky man-child??”
RMMD: “Say what you will. I have a husband AND a cat!”
“I have a boyfriend, a stalker, a murderer and a horny daughter!”
“Hey, is anyone out there WORKING? I’ve been waiting for half an hour for a patient!”
DT: It looks like three giant, bipedal dead caterpillars.
MW: This is why “endering quirks” is never, ever, ever going away. It is now an unspoken feature of the entire comic strip. Mary should be roasting Wilbur for still mourning a relationship which 1) ended two years ago; 2) ended permanently six months ago when Estelle married another man; 3) ended largely because of Wilbur’s own behavior, 4) has already been mourned in the form of Wilbur peacefully attending Estelle’s wedding; 5) has additionally been mourned in the form of a fish funeral, 6) involved a woman who is supposed to be Mary’s friend, and most importantly 7) ignores Wilbur’s current relationship, which he’s been trying to justify all week.
Instead, Mary says something you’d tell a three-year-old about respecting other people’s feelings. Her correct response was “Wilbur, how happy are you in this relationship if you’re still pining for Estelle?”
The “Rex Morgan” team is telling us: “Hey, you think our plots are boring? Just remember — we could be showing you a woman feeding her cat every day. So shut up, alright?!”
DT: it would have made more sense that uncle hated being bossed around by auntie and her two dweebs. He was planning on embezzling and fleeing without them. This makes him have too much of a conscience.
MW: Now we get to the point. The audience knows the threat to Dawnie is not just emotional or a lack of attention but literal. This tilts the argument in the discussion the creators wanted: does Wilbur being physically happy outweigh Dawniie’s emotional happiness?? Clearly the creators believe Wilbur being schlubby and a dolt shouldn’t be happy.
GT: is this after the game or a mid game break so the team could go buy more baseball bats?
RMMD; meanwhile the clinic is now over two hours behind schedule.
Phantom: good thing the temple has a high vaulted ceiling. These thoughts are profound and rising.
RMMD: Beatty is hinting that if enough readers sign wavers absolving him of all strip induced trauma he’ll consider introducing shockingly exciting stories.
Today’s Mary Worth, edited.
DT I’m actually kinda sorry to learn the context of this scene, because I thought it was just unrelated images that fit with the general ambiance of the strip, the same way Mark Trail shows bucolic animal scenes in the foreground.
GT: The players have to go buy their own bats or they’ll be stuck with those canoe paddles the district provides.
A&J – Janis flashed her tits to the construction crew, didn’t she?
MW: Wanting to be happy is not in itself a selfish thing. In fact, we should all strive to find happiness in our lives. But Wilbur has shown time and time again that he can never be satisfied by anything. He thinks that he deserves more than what he’s been given and that his happiness trumps everyone else’s, including the safety of his only child. All of his relationships have ended because he either thinks he should have the best or his refusal to accept that he’s not the center of someone’s universe. And yet at the end of the day, he acts as though he’s the one who was wronged and that the world has it out for him.
No, Wilbur, you don’t deserve to be happy because you’re a narcissistic manchild who can’t take any responsibility for your actions.
MW (translated): “Me me me me me me me!”
“How quirky you are!”
GT: Sad that the kids have to buy their own baseball and softball bats, but they know they can’t keep winning with those cricket bats and oars Milford High provides.
@Banana Jr. 6000: I wouldn’t say that he peacefully attended the wedding since he was sulking about not wanting to be stuck with a bunch of animals as though he was trying to tell himself that he was better off. That’s more like a sour grapes metaphor than making peace. Granted, Estelle was being a selfish bitch because dead puppies ruined her dinner but at least she wised up and didn’t settle for marrying her pets’ abuser.
@14 Banana Jr. 6000: Good one!
@17 Scratchy Scrotum LXIX: Of course she did. She has a positive body image.
DtM: Did you ever hear tell of Michel Lolito, a.k.a. Monsieur Mangetout, the French ‘entertainer’ who was able to consume large quantities of metal, and eventually ate an entire Cessna 150 plane? Because I think Mr Wilson has.
RMMD: It’s funny, because this strip managed to make a murder thuddingly boring, so regular ‘uneventful’ life here must be absolutely come-inducing. No wonder these two look like mannequins who have had botox.
DT: Love the toe tags hanging there at a jaunty angle. Nice touch.
RMMD: Coming next week: “Different cat food, you say?! How’s that going? Please, tell me all about it!”
Dick Tracy: [Cue Six Feet Under theme]
Also Dick Tracy: What happened to these strangely elongated corpses, you ask? Why, the same thing that happens to the plots in this strip: they went up and through the asses of the creators, in the process getting weird, stretched out, and almost human. Oh, and Dick shot them.
Also Also Dick Tracy: “I have my family’s fate on my conscience, already. I was really hoping I’d have it on my conscience later, when we got to Mexico and I buried them all in shallow graves in Guadalajara.”
Dennis the Menace: “In fact, he’s been losing weight steadily for the last six months for no discernible reason. You’d think I’d be concerned about his health, but, you know, egg prices have been going up.”
@Needless Exposition: Yeah, the word “peacefully” was doing a lot of work there. I meant to say that attending Estelle’s wedding to someone else – someone who was the exact opposite of Wilbur in many ways – should have been an opportunity for Wilbur to say goodbye to whatever lingering feelings he had.
Wilbur Weston is the new Les Moore. He’s going to spend the rest of his life pouting and sulking about the loss of something that was largely his own fault. And nobody is ever going to say anything to him about it, like “move on” or “take responsibility” or “grow up.” All of which these men need to hear. Instead, the world will just keep handing them crazed females and writing awards.
DT: It is veryveryvery important to the artists that we know the mangling of bodies in the car crash did not mess up “auntie”‘s bosom.
Phantom: Um, Kyabje, dude – she came back and hid in your monastery. Remember your first instinct? She’s only removed suspicion if she’s never found out to be with you. Send her packing!
PearlsBeforeSwine: Reminds me of how my dad would say he’d gone to confession and managed to maintain a state of grace until he had to deal with the drivers getting out of the parking lot…
DtM: Good Old Mr. Wilson has taken up vaping in a misguided attempt to get a side gig in Gil Thorpe.
GT: Overhearing the boys’ discussion, a pair of near-by Mensa members breaks into tears.
JP: “Oh, Glen, thank God you made it. You’re the only person here I can stand for more than 10 minutes. . . . Heh-heh, just kidding, folks!”
MW: “Oh sure, Mary, take her side and too bad for good old Wilbur, is that it? Maybe you don’t mind being a dried-up old celibate, but I sure do! So you can take your muffins and . . . well, I’m not quite done with this one yet, but when I am, you can take your muffins and . . . um, you got any more of these?”
@Banana Jr. 6000: very nice – this is the very thought running through the mind of MW
Pluggersville has caught onto pickleball maybe a year after Hootin’ Holler did. Which is the next legacy strip to find it?
Blondie: This is actually a win. Dagwood, a “doofus dad” sort for ninety years, stopped before the point where he has to tell the plumber “I tried to fix it myself”.
Dick Tracy: In your time of sorrow–three family members killed at once! an entire generation gone, a wife you’ll never see again!–the City Morgue provides free pedicures*. It’s the least they can do.
*Two dead family members, and you have to pay, but discount rates.
RMMD: We’re going to get at least of a week of Snowball refusing to eat her new food, aren’t we?
DtM: Too bad we couldn’t get Dennis in the scene, so he could say something menacing like, “The fat shots aren’t working.”
@Banana Jr. 6000: Thankfully Wilbur doesn’t seem to be receiving any awards; the shallow praise of selfish exploitation is nauseating enough already considering that he can’t even be bothered to do his job half the time. Mary’s probably still writing his stupid column right now.
RMMD – Remember when widdle Sawah was the best artist in the world and everyone was fighting over just how much money to give her as a reward for being so awesome?
It was idiotic, which was the only thing interesting about the strip in the first place.
Three corpses. RMMD. JP. A3G. We barely knew ye….
6Chx: And sometimes a heart-warming sentiment is just made-up pap that doesn’t make any sense.
Luann: Wee weenie? Okay, I’m not touching tha . . . uh, I mean I’m not going there.
RMMD: That second panel is meme-worthy. It is so smug and hypocritical. It pines for a life free of events, when events always end up with these people being handed valuable property, and all their crimes being wiped away. And dominatrix lawyer girl here has so much condescending “don’t hate me because I’m rich and beautiful” energy, while at the same time being completely bland and forgettable. This may be the perfect Rex Morgan panel.
9CL – “Mummy, can you answer a question Lolly and I have about Intimate Relations?”
The strip is beyond parody at this point. Can he at least stop sexualizing children? It’s gone from subtext to text, and having them be adults one day and then children again the next doesn’t make it better.
@Calvin’s Cardboard Box: 9CL – Can he at least stop sexualizing children?
No. No, he can’t.
Luann: “Hi, MGR. I’m LNN.” I look forward to the Evanses’
very accurate portrayals ofgrievances against fast food employees.CS: Haaaa! Crankshaft wants to further endanger kids! Funny stuff!
9CL: The answer is, of course, yes. You can only evade the question for so long, Edda!
George’s whistle shattered the conversation. “Foul! Too much personal information, Martha. Fifteen yard penalty.”
LUANN – Of course, her new boss will be Ann Eiffel. Good. Best character in the strip.
You are speaking of Rex Morgan and not 9 Chickweed, right?
Another excellent refutation of Dennis’s menaceness: Dennis is not even needed to ruin Mr Wilson’s life, Martha can do it herself!
@taig:
Luann: “Hi, MGR. I’m LNN.” I look forward to the Evanses’
very accurate portrayals ofgrievances against fast food employees.Oh, wow, a RESTAURANT. What a unique, new setting for this strip. It’s not like the strip ALREADY has a restaurant as a workplace setting, and 5 other characters work there!
Absolutely. It’s not easy to get one of those Bobcat hard hats.
On that note, Wilbur – with whatever deluded body image he has – is totally going to fuck that muffin, isn’t he?
We know that war destroys the natural order of things, because fathers bury their sons instead of sons burying their fathers. But what about… uncles burying their nephews? I mean, it’s sad but not exactly poignant!
Yawn. At least talk about how you’re going to get the murder truck the personalized license plate “MRDR TRK”, ladies.
***
Dick Tracy didn’t even get to shoot one of the perps? I wouldn’t want to be the next scofflaw he catches jaywalking.
@Banana Jr. 6000:
This is why “endering quirks” is never, ever, ever going away.
I’m reporting you to Comment Management.
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX: Well, she may have just bent over and shown them her ass.
DT: That’s the closest the two idiot nephews will ever get to having a naked woman under the sheets lying next to them.
@Banana Jr. 6000:
Ha haaaaa! Well done!
The hospital above this morgue must be particularly inept if they have to smuggle out two bodies on every corpse gurney just to keep their accreditation. “Oh, hey, it’s the county Medical Examiner. How’s it going, Quincy? Me? Oh, there was a disaster at the freak show, so I’m hauling all these eight-foot tall corpses off to Potter’s Field. Why are there feet sticking out at both ends? Well, uh, freak show, man, am I right? You really don’t want to look.”
DT – I’m hearing a New York Jewish inflection on that narration box. “Oy gevalt! I have my family’s fate on my conscience, already! And it’s a clear explanation of this story you want? You should live so long!”
MW: No, Wilbur, you do not deserve happiness. You do not even deserve the mayo you have in your fridge.
Don Abundio, translated:
“The boss and the Admiral have been friends for 30 years”
“I know, they do everything together”
“Abundio makes a great show of being generous!”
“And yet, I have the feeling that somehow the Admiral always gets the short end of the stick”
MW:
Wilbur: “Well, why can’t Dawn just move out, then?”
Mary: “Uh…”
FC: Bill is either going to barf on PJ, or he’s getting ready to feed PJ regurgitated food.
Dustin: Dustin as a comic strip ruins the concept of “happy hour.”
Reminds me of watching Slow Horses last night. One of the horses objects when Lamb has to dispose of his phone because it’s been tracking their movements. He protests, saying “I Face Time my kids on that.” Lamb says, “I don’t care if you arse-time the Pope.”
That cracked me up, as did Luann today. Not because of her trying to get a wee weenie, but because of the employee yelling “This job sucks! I quit!” in front of the customers, sort of like Jennifer Aniston giving Mike Judge the finger in Office Space.
DT: Looks like the little piggy on that corpse on the right went “wee wee wee, all the way home” and decided never to come back.
@Anonymous: LUANN – “Oh, wow, a RESTAURANT. What a unique, new setting for this strip. It’s not like the strip ALREADY has a restaurant as a workplace setting, and 5 other characters work there!”
Remember when The Fuze was going to be an artistic space for plays and musicals and all sorts of creative endeavors led by Luann, who was a savant at stage design as well as a lead actress?
Now it’s just a restauraunt.
Remember when Ann Eiffel and Bwad worked at Weenie World?
Now it’s Luann’s turn!!!
Can they bring Ann back to be Luann’s boss and have her constantly dropping innuendos that nobody ever recognizes?
DT – The narration box is talking to some guy named Already. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for that comma.
Dennis the Menace-A thirty day diet for the last thirty years.
MW-Wilbur, you let people think you died after you fell off a cruise ship. You don’t deserve happiness.
RMMD-“What’s it like to live in a neighborhood? When I leave here I’m consigned to a featureless white void.”
Luann-And that’s how Luann ended up as manager.
RMMD: The only way this could get more exciting is if they told us the flavor and if Snowball was eating wet or dry food.
RMMD: I once wrote a story where, towards the end, the protagonist expressed the desire for the rest of his life to be one that is very pleasant to lead but very boring to read about.
Unlike RMMD, however, I did not subject my readers to said boredom.
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX: “the employee yelling “This job sucks! I quit!” in front of the customers, sort of like Jennifer Aniston giving Mike Judge the finger in Office Space.”
“This job sucks, and I dont …. I don’t need it!!”
What a cathartic movie that was. Still one of my best ever.
Dude gets hit by a drunk driver, is in a full body cast, but he’s going to get a settlement to compensate for his lifetime disability.
“See, good things DO happen to people, I’m living proof of that!”
Oh! And the boss calls him for the dozenth time on a Saturday. “It’s a full work day, not a half day, so if you could just go ahead and come on in to the office that would be greaaa -”
(Hangs up on his boss and goes back to sleep)
MW: Huh. I just realized that if Mary had a plug up her ass, she’d be a dead ringer for that table lamp.
Be careful not to JUMP TO CONCLUSIONS!
I love that movie, too.
MW: “Okay, Wilbur, let’s try a thought experiment. Suppose Dawn brought home a boyfriend, and he kept offering you vegan food. How would you feel about that?” “Well, I would think he was trying to poi- Oh. Oh, no.”
Rex Morgan, MD -Terry Beatty has to tread a fine line there, not mentioning the brand or type of cat food that woman is feeding her cat, or the prior food she switched off from. If you thought Prohibition was bad, you don’t want to be in the middle of cat fanatics wet. vs dry debates!
MW: Not that this is a surprise to anyone but yes, Wilbur is ignoring his daughter getting poisoned to get laid. I really didn’t think that was the route they were going to go but I do have to appreciate at least a little that we are leaning into Wilbur Weston being the most insufferable asshole in all of comics.
@Banana Jr. 6000: Let’s not forget the wedding of Wilbur’s other ex Iris (whose groom, despite his tendency to pose precariously on ledges at Slippery Rock Falls, was a trade-up from Wilbur in every conceivable metric), where the officiant gets to the “speak now or forever hold your peace” part and several characters glare at Wilbur with “keep your mouth shut or I swear to GOD” expressions while Wilbur goes “WHAT? Why is everybody looking at me?” The entire scenario, which should have carried the mood of “this is a terrible trash fire of a human being and no woman deserves to be tormented by his companionship” was played with the attitude of “tee hee, that’s our Wilbur!” and, on the list of dick moves passed off as endearing quirks, is second only to “I stayed on a cruise company’s private island for a week and was waited on hand and foot while all my friends and family thought I was dead.”
@Philip: Nah, real cat fanatics will tell you that wet food is essential to a cat’s overall health and quality of life. The real debate is whether you feed them wet food only or supplement it with dry.
DTM: Blowing a referee’s whistle whenever your wife makes a cheap joke at your expense: moderately menacing.
DT: I don’t know about unusually tall, but why are all the corpses the same height? Like, wasn’t there a big deal about the nephews consisting of a tall one and a short one, with everyone comparing them to Mutt and Jeff even though nobody under the age of ninety has read a Mutt and Jeff comic?
RMMD: If you need to expend a week having your characters insist that, no really, the previous story arc was absolutely horrifying, maybe it wasn’t all that horrifying to begin with.
@TheDiva: This is exactly why I compared Wilbur Weston to Les Moore. He used to be the strip’s punching bag, or at least get pushback when it was called for. But no more. Wilbur is now to be indulged at all times, with no regard to how rude or unhealthy his behavior is, or how much it would aggravate even his friends. “Endearing quirks” is here to stay, no matter what disciplinary committee @All of Mankind wants to refer me to.
Dick Tracy: As a longtime reader of this strip, I have to comment on the fact that the villains’ deaths happened off-panel in a Sunday page and only in the Sunday page. This goes against the way stories have been told in DT for over 90 years, and the way serial strips as a rule do it: If you’re telling the same story in the Sundays that’s in the dailies, you show everything in the dailies and then use the Sunday as a recap, maybe with a tease at something that will be reiterated in the Monday strip. This is so readers whose papers carry daily OR Sunday, but not both, don’t miss anything important. But here, it’s “Oh, they’re gonna crash” on Saturday and “Whoops, they’re dead” on Monday. And boy, what a hell of a jump for the people who only get the Sunday page.
Gasoline Alley: Hey, smooth move, Slim! Have your 75-year-old (but surprisingly young-looking) wife get out and shift those 55-gallon drums all by herself! God forbid you should haul your own prodigious ass out of the truck, right?
DT: Josh wonders why the corpses are so elongated.
He missed the strip where the family flew through the windshield, under the 1930s steamtroller, then into a printing press and into the rock crusher from “Indiana Jones’” adventure in India.
I believe that strip was published when GoComics was still in its transition period.
RMMD/pugfuggly@23: Beatty once did a plane crash strip where we never saw the crash, just Rex telling his daughter “Well. That was exciting.”
Is the comically cursing aunt related to Captain Archibald Haddock from the Tintin comics? Because this would be a lousy way for that once-noble bloodline to be terminated.
C’shaft: “Come ooooon, they do it all the time in India!”
Dustin: Woman with purse: Walking away haughtily after shutting down whatever stupid pick-up line Dustin tried on her.
Women in background: Were hit on by Dustin five minutes ago, and are still arguing over whether they should throw their drinks in his face or just punch him.
Woman with phone: Has not been hit on by Dustin yet, but recorded his previous efforts and is posting them to TikTok with the caption “MEN: DO NOT DO THIS, EVER”
Woman with margarita: Turned away from Dustin in hopes that he won’t go after her next, while keeping a careful eye on her friend’s drink just in case Dustin decides to roofie it.
GT: I have to admire Leo’s restraint for not decking his friends when they started pulling the “Magical Native American” bullshit on him.
JP: Did Glen not shave this morning, or is he doing a makeup test for the Off-Broadway immersive production of Phantom of the Opera coming this summer and forgot to take some of the latex off?
Luann: Luann doesn’t know enough to know you place your order at the speaker, not the payment window. I’d say she’s not Weenie World material.
MW: Welp, there we have it, Wilbur Weston is officially the most awful human being in the history of the comics page, beating out Ed Crankshaft, Les Moore, Michael Patterson, and the entire casts of both Dustin and 9 Chickweed Lane. It was a tight race, but the odds-on favorite pulled through in the end.
Phantom: Yeah, up until the point that she’s found hanging around your monastery while you do absolutely nothing about it; it’s like you want to die in some prophetic cascading tragedy….
Pluggers Lies. Pluggers will never stop complaining about how they were this close to quarterbacking for the Green Bay Packers; they know that the scout would have signed them on the spot if it wasn’t for their damn rotator cuff…
@Pozzo: The “Rex Morgan” team is telling us: “Hey, you think our plots are boring? Just remember — we could be showing you a woman feeding her cat every day. So shut up, alright?!”
Hey, that’s the exact same plot of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which some people think is the best movie ever made. (But not me.)
Dick Tracy: This feels like a shot you’d see just before the corpses come alive and the zombie apocalypse starts. It won’t happen because Dick Tracy versus zombies would be too cool to ever happen in a newspaper comic, but a man can dream.
Rex Morgan: I’m pretty sure we’ve spent more time on these two aimlessly talking about what happened with the anti-stalker vigilante than we did on that plotline itself.
Dustin-“Why do we keep coming to this lesbian bar?”
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX: That’s one typo just for you, Mr Scrotum :)
@UncleJeff: Late-era A3G was good for that too. “Boy, things sure are happening over there, just out of frame…”
Dick Tracy-It wouldn’t be a Dick Tracy if it didn’t end with the criminals dying horribly.
Dennis the Menace: George is so desperate to lose weight that he purchased discount Ozempic pens from a sketchy website. But he’s also so ill-informed, he doesn’t even know that the real ones aren’t something you vape!
DTM: That’s not a spoon. That’s a straw. Martha has finally decided to wire George’s jaw shut. This time the diet will work, God damn it! Why she decided to also sew his eyes shut is less clear.
DT: You can tell the corpses are blood kin because of the family resemblance of the feet. Either the idiot nephews have extremely petite pedal extremities or Auntie Claire has one enormous set of hooves.
Luann: There’s some sociological reason why there are so many national burger fast-food chains and no hot dog ones, but I can’t remember exactly what it is. Something to do with public fellatio, I expect.
@Banana Jr. 6000: #14
Perfect!!!
@Ukulele Ike: #91: According to a treaty signed decades ago between hamburgers and hot dogs burgers get the national fast food chains while hot dogs get sporting event concessions.
FC: That was no static shock. PJ punched Dolly in the face for cutting in line.
TG: quick, Rob, get thee to a dollar store before the t becomes a $5 store! Honestly, those of us who’ve worked in grassroots nonprofits know how to find attractive smooth stones for paperweights, reusing file folders, waiting on a going out of bussiness sale.
CS: i dont get it, are they short of buses or of drivers? Public schools have fewer students with all the private schools popping up — or is Centerville Elementary THAT good?
BF: even Maeves doomed love life is preferable to Susans stomach chattering. Maybe they both need the lesson from Alex in BETTY.
FG: Thinking — the true start of a rebellion
MW: oh no, Mary is challenging Wilbur’s narcissism. In the future will he have to refuse free muffins or be harangued into acknowledging the existence of others.
PHANTOM: Narcissism– the true start of a “perfect world”. KD, reconsider what you’re thinking.
9cl: “What a fascinating question, girls!. Let’s pop in this videotape and find out!”
RMMD: What th—? They’re bringin’ back Snowball?? A little *notice* woulda been nice. Now we’ve gotta recast her before they wanna show her on panel — if that ever happens. As I recall, the character was a white Domestic Short-Hair, who I believe has since retired. Unfortunately a lot of our employment records are missing after they were subpoenaed.
But we’ve got a lotta White Felines in inventory, so I’m sure one will be up to the job. They’re gonna make her a picky eater this time? Inject a little bit of personality? I see they learned from the Buster story that Animal Stars can keep the audience engaged more so than the bland two-legger actors.
What’s that, Intern? Odin says he’ll clip off his long hair and play an opposite gender role if necessary? Well, he’s still under contract to Mary Worth, but… I dunno if he’ll ever get work there again… or even want to..
Judge Parker: I think she’s slipping him the tongue.
@Activist: get thee to a dollar store before it becomes a $5 store!
Too late. We already have Five Below.
@Banana Jr. 6000:
Alright, Banana, I’ve tried to be nice about this, but now it’s gone too far. The Tribunal will meet in conclave at midnight. I don’t expect it will take long.
@Activist: Same with us teachers. We spend SO much of our own money on stuff the district should supply.
MW: You’re lonely and alone, are you Wilbur? Are you also sad and saddened? When Belle gives up on poisoning and just shoots Dawn, will the gun be gunmetal gray?
Also MW: Does Wilbur expect anyone to believe that he’s still hung up over Estelle? He spent his relationship with her pining over Iris and making a drunken fool of himself on their double date. After his relationship with Estelle ended, it was the sight of Iris and Zak together, not Estelle and Ed, that sent him into a psychotic fit, pushing people into traffic.
REX MORGAN M.D: “I’m happy to say that biggest event in my life lately has been starting Snowball on a different cat food.” Just in case you were wondering why Michelle gets so little screen time.
REX MORGAN M.D. (2): Actually, the biggest event in your life, Michelle, was when Jordan’s shady blck-ops buddy tried assassinate you and you husband on your wedding day and then changed his mind at the last minute. It was the explosion that rocked downtown, remember? (of course, in a confirmation of Josh’s hypothesis, the characters quickly downplayed and ignored that attack as “unpleasant”, potential safety be damned, so hurray for the intellectual laziness of the incurious mind!)
REX MORGAN M.D. (3): Oh my freaking god! That’s the moral of the story isn’t it? This arc began with Summer lamenting her routine, lonely, pedestrian life and wanting to “shake things up” by hopping into the singles scene. Teach her to go against the heady bliss of dull stagnation. Remember kids, never leap beyond the bounds of predictable mediocrity!
@All of Mankind: I’m sure it won’t.
Crank: I read this a few times before I realised Ed was saying “What if we strapped kids to the roof?” (I may be being overly generous in thinking there would be straps) and not “They say kids get on the school bus … but what if they didn’t?” The problem with that interpretation, of course, is that that can’t be a new idea he’s just had, since it’s been his standard operating procedure for decades — and, it’s sometimes suggested, also that of every other school bus driver in Centreville. Which raises the question of how this “bus overcrowding” thing even makes sense in the established setting,
MW: At this point, even Neddy Driver-Spencer would look at Wilbur and think “Jeez, think about someone else for a change!” Admittedly, that’s because she’s completely lacking in self-awareness, but still.
RMMD: Given how boring the story of stalkers and stalker-murderers managed to be, is it possible that, had we spent the last few weeks following Michelle and her cat, this would have worked in reverse and it would somehow have become interesting? Probably not.
S4th: There’s a poem by Isaac Asimov about different kinds of rejection letter. The final one, I think, is the kind that’s fulsome in its praise of the story, with Asimov’s point being that, even so, it’s still a rejection letter.
MW: This feels like a buildup to an episode of The Steve Wilkos Show.
“You’re one of the biggest dirtbags I’ve ever had on this show. And to hide behind your “Oh, but I wanted to be happy, no one loves me, boo hoo!”, facade, you’re the worst! You chose a psychopath over the health and safety of your own daughter! You failed your daughter! You dirty, disgusting “man”! GET THE HELL OFF MY STAGE!!!”
@Dennis Jimenez: RMMD – YES! The grueling, meaningless life uneventful!! That’s the ticket!!!
What trenchant commentary! We predict good things the next time Comment Of The Week rolls around.
@Calvin’s Cardboard Box: What a cathartic movie that was.
The movie that destroyed my career. Lucky thing I didn’t see it when it came out, but a long time later.
Phantom: Kyabje is not thinking clearly about the danger he and the monastery face. Was he mesmerized by the sight of Savarna sitting cross-legged on the floor across from him? Commando in every sense of the word.
@Lauralot: Exactly. Wilbur treated Estelle like a consolation prize for most of their relationship because he wanted Iris who he more or less dumped for Fabiana but also expected her to pine for him rather than move on. He doesn’t want Estelle herself but wants the possessive idea of Estelle despite his abusive behavior he displayed towards her and her pets.
RMMD: Instead of donating the truck to charity Augie should’ve hauled it around the county fair circuit, charging the rubes a dollar a pop to see the Celebrity Murder Truck.
DT: Ahhh, this is the DT I remember from childhood. The willingness to make people gruesomely dead, even relatively-normal-looking people whose crimes did not seem all that severe, fascinated small Poteet. In this case, it appears a rack might have been used. Ewwww.
MT: And I’ll bet the little detail about the riding taking place on someone else’s private land will not be mentioned again. I refuse to even entertain the possibility that the riding is taking place on Mark Trail’s own private land, because that would make this story even stupider than it is already.
MW: “I deserve extended blow jobs that make my toes curl! I deserve to be ridden hard and fast! I deserve to explore the back country! I deserve…” “SHUT THE FUCK UP, WILBUR!!”
MW; Belle needs to kill. If she doesn’t get to kill Dawn, it will be you Wilbur.
LUANN: I am begging you, Evansii. Let your protagonist graduate from college. Let her move into her twenties and into the job market. She has been nineteen for about ten years. Some comic strips (see ZITS) can keep their characters the same age for many years and not drive readers, meaning me, crazy. How can I put this gently? You can’t. Let Luann graduate.
DtM: Josh says that’s a spoon, but it looks more like Mr. Wilson is vaping.
FG: Yeah, guilt trip me all you want, Kotch, but you’d think different if you saw the mega hot hawkwoman I got to boink.
No one is laughing with you.
See, Dick Tracy? Gonna tell us ONE of these clowns didn’t need to be kicked into a flaming, industrial fan? Something? Kill someone, already!
@Poteet
Zits doesn’t drive you crazy?
@DNA disaster: One of the hard lessons life will teach you.
DT: Claire Piltdown and Her Nitwit Nephews are about to do a showstopping musical number, aren’t they?
RMMD: Left unsaid is that “Snowball” is a 40-year-old man who wears a cat collar and who Michelle and Jordan keep in their basement.
@115 Poteet: If anyone wonders why the Shadow Float is late today, it’s this comment causing hysterical blindness.
9CL: Why is Juliet asking? Didn’t Edda and Amos’s first time get broadcast worldwide by camera drones? (And no, I’m not happy about the Overlook Twins saying “intimate relations” either, but this is the exact strip where that kind of thing happens.)
C-Shaft: Hang tough, everyone. It’s Friday. With any luck by next week the bus overcrowding problem will have disappeared into the ether just like the not-enough-riders problem.
Dustin: Dustin and Fitch are the only men aside from the bartender himself, so I suspect “happy hour” is code for “lipstick lesbian meetup.”
GT: It’s going to break these kids’ brains when they learn that they’re all just specters in the brain of Gil Thorp, who didn’t actually survive that heart attack.
Marvin: Dr. Frank N. Furter regrets starting a new career as a preschool teacher but is mildly surprise that Marvin isn’t the one taking it to a peepee place.
MW: Indeed, what about Wilbur’s happiness, the one thing none of us pay sufficient attention to. Gawd, it’s not every day, thankfully, that a comic strip panel audibly whines at me.
@Horace Broon: Re S4th: Speaking from experience I can say that any letter that indicates the editors actually read the damn thing is an improvement on the alternative.
@Poteet: #113: In the Chester Gould era that car would’ve burst into flames and we would’ve been treated to the Horrocks family screaming in agony as they were being burned alive.
DtM: Poor Mr. Wilson. Dennis keeps taking all his sweets. Unless Mr. Wilson is purposely feeding Dennis large amounts of junk food so he won’t live past 40 and Mr. Wilson can enjoy his late 80s in peace.
@The Breathtaking Bonehead Brothers: You are a sentient bean!
@Poteet:
We can dream, anyway.
DtM: Mr. Wilson’s nicotine craving got to be too strong to ignore, so he’s sneaking a quick hit from his vape pen.
@Artist formerly known as Ben: Nitwit Nephews
We will miss our fellow fictional cousins.
DtM – Mr. Wilson is probably eating celery but the colorist only has old rotten celery at home and thinks celery is gray.
Poor devil.
MW: Wilbur is a clown.