Mostly soapy Friday
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Mary Worth, 5/29/26
Oh, I guess I haven’t really mentioned that Tommy and Dawn are falling in love or whatever. You know how last week I was like “Why does Dawn, who as far as I can remember has never really interacted with Tommy before, have such beef with him?” Well, I think the Mary Worth creative team learned about the concept of an “enemies-to-lovers arc” and decided to do one with Dawn and Tommy and then realized they had to make them enemies first. Or at least make Tommy an enemy to Dawn. Tommy would never view anyone as an enemy! He’s too pure! He’s like a golden retriever, if a golden retriever completed a 12-step program!
Gil Thorp, 5/29/26
In other soap opera romance news, it turns out that Gil’s hot younger fiance is secretly a nerd who doesn’t have any friends, and is currently speed-running a gender-swapped version of the beloved 2009 bromantic comedy I Love You Man. She’s trying to rope Coach Cami into being one of her bridesmaids and honestly? It’s not going well! Cami doesn’t look like she’s having fun at all!
Dennis the Menace, 5/29/26
I think the joke here is that Dennis is proposing that he could “play” the cassette tape like it’s a harmonica? But it kind of just looks like he’s going to eat it, which is frankly much funnier. And menacing, too!
Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/29/26
“I had really forgotten how difficult working a regular job is, ha ha. Anyway, turns out my fan base still loves me, so I can probably go back to being a celebrity now. Smell ya later!”
81 replies to “Mostly soapy Friday”
RMMD: “By the way, I can’t feel the right side of my face. Am I having a stroke?”
MW:
“Kinda like family to me! — you know, like the Gambino family; the Borgia family…”
RMMD:
“Would you ever consider stopping wearing that baseball cap backwards, Luis?”
“Well, I’d want to wear it this way at least until I’d be able to make my way through our inventory of pumpernickel in back.”
“Why is that, Luis?”
“I’d be the catcher in the rye and all.”
GT: Smart of the decorator to leave space between the G and the I in Gil’s name for the word balloon.
Mutants have invaded Milford.
MW: “Mary’s kinda like family to me! Like a great-aunt who brings over casseroles so she can judge the state of the house, or who invites herself in for a cup of tea and complains for an hour about all the manual labor she can’t possibly do herself, until you offer to do it for her so she’ll go away.”
They go to eat together, and Dawn slops some food on her face. ALL IS LOST.
DTM: Dennis is the perfect age to have seen Guardians of the Galaxy and Stranger Things, so he has no problem identifying a cassette tape. A lot of issues interacting appropriately with other people and their stuff, though.
How can you tell if Cami is having fun, or isn’t, or is constipated, or is longing for her after dinner tipple? The wind turned when she was making that face and she can’t get it back to normal.
Gil Thorp:
“Cam, we don’t look like distorted holograms today for a change — is our illustrator, like, maybe under the weather or something?”
Dennis the Menace:
“Dennis, why don’t you follow up that command performance on that cassette with a kazoo solo using the plastic spine of your school paper report cover?”
Wary Morth:
“In fact, you’re prime boyfriend material! Marry me!”
____________________________________________
Murky Tail:
“This is her.”
“This is her *what*?”
“This is her inability to speak grammatical English!”
____________________________________________
Wrecks Moregone:
“Right, now I’ve put your cafe back on its feet, I’ll get off mine, go back to Hollywood, and get back to acting. Oh, Mud, could you be a darling and bring my car around for me?”
MW: “And she’s kinda like family to me too!” Says Dawn.
“Well, you know what they say.” Says Tommy. “Incest is best!”
Rex Morgan thinks he hears something, stirs slightly, looks around. There is nothing. He returns to staring blankly, and dreaming of cake.
Mr. Wilson’s attic contains:
That boombox
A curtained window
A wall covering half the window
An elevated platform with a chair and dresser on it
A miniature version of itself, atop the dresser.
Dennis menaces him and he menaces the concept of Euclidean space.
Questionable Malcontent:
In which Goddess Empress Claire calls Emily (once upon a time far and away the most brilliant, if odd, character in the comic) a literal child.
I hate this strip so much.
CS: “Do we have black hole insurance?” “No, but we have a standing offer of $1,000,000 payments from both the town and the State of Ohio for disposing of your father by any means necessary. I think this vacation just got a little longer!”
MW – He thinks Mary’s cool – the meth has affected your sanity, Tommie Tweaker….
GT – Hey – here at the Barney Pub, I love you, you love me, we’re one happy family….
DtM – It should be a wax cylinder….
RMMD – Just put those muddy boots on and start walkin’….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
JP – did Manley have a beef with the lettered, who is now making the word balloon tails massive to cover more art?
Luann – Options? I’ve thought about them a lot. Travel… more dining out… time for hobbies and interests… a higher standard of living… so many options.
Ph: Nawww, he wants revenge on Stripeypants? No way! Whatta twist! I swore he was after MaeMae!
RMMD — How many layers of management does this hotel cafe have?
And realistically, many breakfast/brunch/lunch cooks and waiters have evening gigs at other establishments, so yeah, they might mind, even with the no doubt princely hourly wage at the Glenwood Motel. . .
MW: Did these two actually hike into the woods or are we seeing this through Dawn’s fantasy vision? Tomorrow Tommy will morph into a blond version of the Brawny paper towel guy and the transition will be complete.
f course, a Gil Thorpe character doesn’t look happy. They’re drawn as to look barely human these days.
MW: Dawn has REALLY had to search to find someone that she can patronize. Still not sure she’s there.
RMMD: When I was a kid, a local shoe store, as a talking point, kept ducks in the front window. I’m picturing Sideburns doing the same to Mae Mae.
GT: Beth loves Gil. It’s unfortunate that virtually everyone else in his world is a jerk.
DtM: Ah, youth! One of my (teen) grandkids came to me with a handful of “defective” kazoos. Yeah, he was blowing into them.
Oh, Tommy. Guard your heart just a little, you mop-headed muffin. For one thing, getting close to Dawn = proximity to Wilbur, and you just kicked that meth habit not too long ago. And y’know, someday soon — maybe even tonight — Dawn is going to go to, like, the store, and then where will you be? Pouting in your newfound garden, that’s where. “Why did she leave me?” you’ll sigh, staring off into the middle distance, kale seeds in hand. “It was me or the Piggly Wiggly, and I guess I just don’t make the grade.”
mary worth – since where in the woods tommy wanna see my BEAVER !!!!
“So these were the cassettes you had when you were young!”
“What, no! I bought all of them ten years ago after watching ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’. I’m a huge Marvel fan”
@beer farmer: Beavers don’t live in forests, they live in open, marshy areas. And Otoboke.
The only consolation of the Iris-Wilbur couple was that they were too old to have kids. But now Dawn and Tommy threaten to spread their cursed genes into the world! Quick Mary, tell them they because Iris and Wilbur were a item they are technically brother and sister and so shouldn’t mate!
Gil Thorp: Why is Beth wearing a maternity dress? Why is Cami wearing a Monsters, Inc. polo shirt? Why does Beth’s arm fold at that crazy angle? Why does everything look two-dimensional? Why is anything, my friends?
DtM: Careful, Dennis — if you eat that, you might get a tapeworm. (I’ll show myself out.)
@pugfuggly: They call it the Remote Forest Edge of Santa Royale™. It’s a wilderness with no cell service, which we’ve now established is reachable by balloon, dachshund, sedan, and the “Fairtree Mountain Trails.”
DtM – Is Dennis a child of the 50’s dressed in his overalls and 20 years away from the cassette? Or a child of the 2020s, for whom the mere idea of music on physical media is foreign? Either way, this joke works, so congrats to the DtM team for leaning into the temporal ambiguity of the setting.
RMMD Also, my feet are killing me – turns out there is a downside to gaining weight by enjoying eating. Looks like it’s time to hit the GLP-1s and rejoin Hollywood society’s expectations!
GT – “As long as Gil likes you, you’re cool with me – and the moment he tires of you, you will no longer exist as far as I’m concerned, because I don’t want to end up in the cornfield. All hail Gil!”
JP Better pack up the burger so I can take it home, you were making too much sense there for a minute
Once again, Dennis the Menace is answering the vital questions of our times. For example: How do you keep a moron occupied and quiet for several hours, while sacrificing only a copy of “Abba’s Lesser-Known Regional Swedish Hits”?
@Pozzo: You simultaneously impress and disgust me. Hats off, Sir.
Crankshaft-“What comic strip can we move to that will put the most distance between us and your father?”
Dennis the Menace-And over here are a bunch of video tapes with Mrs. Wilson’s “art films” that she used to make.
Dustin-“Does this story involve the corpses in the break room and the trail of blood that leads to this elevator?”
MW-Dawn, you don’t want to hear Tommy’s thoughts on mayonnaise.
RMMD-“My feet are killin’ me.” Oh good then this story can end much faster.
Mary Worth: “You’re not as bad as I thought, Tommie Beedie!” “Wide, child-bearing hips, flattened, microencephalic brain case, she’ll do.” Yes, truly a match made in heaven.
Tommy is going to marry into the Weston family, the poor guy. Just let him start doing meth again, it will mess up his life a lot less.
***
Pity the poor, aging newspaper comic artist who is cursed to live in the past but can’t quite remember what a cassette looks like.
“Gil and Mimi were royalty, the perfect couple! But they ended up with a loveless marriage, an acrimonious separation and lingering resentment. But look at you! You are clearly poor and a mess, so your marriage will end up much better!”
“Uh, thanks, I guess”
Dennis the Menace:
“Young person doesn’t understand old media format” is an extremely hoary subject for humor—how many times on the comics pages have we already seen this basic joke played out with vinyl records? Dennis is even doing the famous (but staged) bit from Nanook of the North where he tries to eat it. The fact that he’s doing it with a cassette tape ought to put a chill in all you Gen Xers’ old bones. Still, I think it would’ve been much funnier and more menacing if he’d gone “actually, old man, a cassette tape doesn’t play music, it stores music. You put it in a cassette player like the one right there and that plays music. You’re getting senile to the point you don’t even understand the objects of your own nostalgia!”
“Wait, did Gil tell you ‘please be friend with her, she’s so pathetic’?!”
“Well, don’t take it personally! Gil does the same for his two children and any loner student who he fears will become a school shooter!”
GT: “Gil and Mimi were Milford royalty. Now that they’re divorced, however, Mimi lost all her status, while you’ve been elevated to the position of Favored Concubine.”
Why is Cami treating Beth like a homewrecker? Emily was the one who left Gil for her lesbian golf coach; I can’t remember if Beth was even in the picture at that point but if she was it was definitely in a “crushing on him from a distance” angle. Is Cami sore because this outsider came and snatched up the Most Eligible Bachelor in Milford?
MW: After having a five-minute conversation with Tommy, Dawn has decided he’s her new true love. Truly a chip off the needy, desperate block.
RMMD: Two in the afternoon, or two in the morning? Either way Maena’s owed a federally mandated break, celebrity waitress or not.
Mary Worth:
“You’re not as bad as I thought, Tommy Beedie! That’s an extremely low bar, though! You still fuckin’ suck!”
Comics writers have heard about reality but have no direct experience with it, a new episode! A child of Dennis’ age would probably be more familiar with a cassette than a harmonica
“My feet are killing me!”
“Wait, let’s take a picture! That way we’ll have even more customers!”
I can’t decide which potential direction for this Dawn/Tommy storyline would please me more: one in which Dawn tries to “Vertigo” Tommy into her milksop ex, Jared (with his new, less-threatening moptop and brown mustard tee, he’s just a few surface-level sci-fi references away at this point), or one where the relationship progresses to the point where a Wilbur/Iris/Zak reunion is unavoidable (and where ideally drinks and/or karaoke are heavily involved).
Man I could have sworn we already did the Tommy/Dawn pairing a few years ago. Is there another blond loser she dated?
“As long as they get paid, they are not gonna complain!”
“I know! That’s why I was hoping for some way to get them to work without pay! Working with a Hollywood star… would that count as ‘for exposure’?”
Dustin: …At least it’s not another military recruitment gag.
Luann: Give Clan Evans credit, they keep inventing new ways for the relationships in this strip to be really, really off-putting.
Phantom: So, the mysterious legendary vigilante hero who lives as a shadow and is spoken of with awe and dread has his own publicity photos?
Pluggers are afraid to die.
@TheDiva: re GT: Because everyone in Milford is so fixated on Gil that Cami was, like an immature child, hoping for a Parent Trap plot but Beth making Gil happy ruined it
I think I know exactly the manner in which one would have described Gil and Mimi as “the perfect couple”, and who to demonstrate it…
Next week in Pluggers: “A Plugger gets his daily walk going to the refrigerator during the commercial break “.
GT: It’s very funny that Cami appears to be blaming Beth for Gil’s ex-wife being a lesbian.
Archie-Archie’s dad is holding out for this new thing he heard is coming. It’s called HD DVD.
MW: Meanwhile, as Brandy researches her family’s genealogical records in Florida, she accidentally stumbles onto the birth records of Tommy Beedie and his fraternal twin, Zak, separated at birth but soon to be reunited when Brandy confronts Iris, Zak, and Tommy with the facts that Wilbur is actually their father and just in time to save Dawn from having an incestuous relationship with her half-brother. This time, Piccadee Falls will triumph.
FC: Conspicuous by his absence, Billy knows better than to ask his mom for some junk food after his last experience with Australia’s finest.
“Vegemitenot!”
RMMD – Having foot pain? Maybe you should see a doctor. Are there any doctors in this town?
Luann-“You need pills.” Pills bought from a questionable website with sketchy ads that are plastered all over websites.
DtM: No, Dennis, not like that does. A cassette still plays music when your streaming service has been hacked, or your parents decide it’s not worth paying to hear all those non-existent bands’ AI songs.
Today’s Wizard of Id is set somewhere between Gaudi and Dr. Seuss.
Gasoline Alley: Hey, I was joking when I said Hootin’ Holler and Gasoline Alley were adjacent to each other.
Blondie: Dagwood can escape Elmo at work for 40 hours a week. Blondie doesn’t have such luck.
Zits: Wait, prom? How many proms have these two attended by now?
Dustin: Helen should know her lawyer husband better than to let him draft the promissory agreements.
RMMD: Things take a weird turn when oblivious manager guy sets up a booth where, for a small fee, customers can take turns massaging Mae Mae’s aching feet.
Gasoline Alley – Well, we can’t say we weren’t warned. I’m torn between wanting to skip it next week and reading it to see how awful it will be.
Gil Thorp – I don’t read Mark Trail any more, but I remember that Rusty was a terrible homunculus back in the day. He was never as repulsive as whatever every character in Gil Thorp is now. I bet Rusty feels vindicated if he ever bothers to look at this terrible artwork.
Jules Rivera did make Rusty look like a normal kid. At least she can draw.
FC – The melonheads just got home from visiting holier than thou Grandma. “Those children have to live on whatever junk food they find in the house while that harlot is passed out from drink. No wonder their brains aren’t developing.”
DtM: Dennis overthinks the gag. Pulling out the tape and saying “what’s this?” would have been fine for a six-year old. Trying to intellectualize it with the harmonica bit falls flat.
We know after 60 years you’re bored with the roll but stick with the basics, kid.
Dennis put the cassette to his lips as George scowled, worried about the damage the drool would do to the aged magnetic tape. There was an audible click, and suddenly the angelic tones of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir swelled in the attic. Dennis was still smiling as music poured from his mouth, his ears, in perfect stereo. My god, George thought as he sank to the floor, my terror, my nemesis, was some sort of automaton! But who? Who could be so devious as to inflict this injury upon me? Downstairs, Martha let out a ladylike curse. “I guess it’s back to old reliable,” she muttered, searching the pantry for the rat poison.
No, Tommy, Mary isn’t “cool”. One does not commit such crimes of lese majeste in this condominium complex! As soon as the Board (aka Mary) hears of this, there will be repercussions. Respect must be shown.
MW: Dawn and Tommy are bonding over their shared admiration of Mary Worth. Just like we do here!
Gil Thorp: Why is Gil’s name spelled out in letter tiles on the bar’s back wall? Sports bars are a thing, but high school sports bars?
Yeah, I guess that checks out, but only in Milford, where all competing public entertainment was outlawed upon the birth of the once-and-future coach, GT.
Blondie: Uh, Dagwood, hate to bring you down but you do realize that Elmo, as a child who is still in school, the one who has a cool 10 weeks of summer vacation ahead of him, not you, right? I’d say you’re still going to be sweating away at the J.C. Dithers Construction Company day after day, but let’s face it, you’re just going to be snacking and napping and yapping like you usually do, which, let’s face it, is a pretty sweet gig. Anyway, you’re not going to see any more or less of Elmo than you usually do, but I am heartened by the fact that you don’t actually enjoy this weird little dynamic you have with the neighbor child.
MW: Tommy both undresses and dresses Dawn with his eyes.
“Garters, lace panties, push-up bra, and…………ski mask! perfect.”
You do at least have to give Dennis the Menace some credit! I would’ve expected Dennis to try using the cassette like a smartphone or more likely, an iPod.
MW-Mary is that spinster aunt you act all nice around in order to get into her will.
@Liam: [upbeat but creepy whistling theme] This is Brad. Brad is very dumb. But with Viabrat he can ‘keep it up’ with his neighbors the Alfs! Try Viabrat* today!
*Side effects may include property damage, drinking mud soup, and awkward innuendo. If a grinning apparition appears in your house and stays more than five years, consult your local insane asylum as these could be symptoms you are a serious danger to society.
LUANN: Brad: “At least we’re getting expert care from a professional.”
Shannon: “That’s right, Bwad! By the way, I need you take off your pants and let me stick this split in your urethra to check you sperm count.” (insert TGIF-style “Awwwww!” reaction and laugh-tack here.)
@Liam: I always get my questionable pills down at the truck stop.
MW: Say, Tommy. When you’re done here with Dawn, let’s work on your vocabulary.
Do you know what a ‘succubus’ is?
JP: Now, don’t panic, Judge. Your first instinct is to rush home to your phone, but consider: No one can call you or text you. Seriously, enjoy this rare, fleeting moment while it lasts.
HotC: I’ve noticed the strip is less violent since Steenz took over. Hopefully, this current story arc will correct that.
G-I-L is the new Live Laugh Love.
Blondie, the Neighborhood Bumstead missed National Hamburger Day! Is that a sign of the appocolypse?
Dennis the Menace: It’s true that better art could help out that second half-panel, showing more clearly the open, tape-exposing side of the casette, which does, upon reflection, give it a certain resemblance to a harmonica. But, still: I actually laughed at the joke!