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Panel from Mary Worth, 4/10/16

Guys, when we started on this journey together with Harlan Jones, the Sensual, Bendy, Spiritually Advanced Substitute Art History Professor, I made a joke about how eventually he would make a pass at Dawn. I did this not because I thought it was going to happen, but because I thought it wasn’t. Coming up with absurd counterfactuals for the soap opera strips is basically like at least 75% of why this blog exists, and I figured a forbidden student-professor romance and/or a faculty member making a gross sexual advance on one of his students would be a little too hot for Mary Worth. It’s starting to look like I was wrong, though! It’s starting to look like the most unlikely seduction in human history — a guy who looks like the guy in a 1950s movie whose girlfriend Cary Grant steals gives a half-assed art history lecture about how awesome Leonardo da Vinci was instead of actually talking about art history, inspiring his class’s drippiest student to come talk to him, and then he shifts the topic to yoga, and then she comes and does one yoga class with him, and then she gets invited to a private yoga session at his house, and then probably sex — is about to happen. God have mercy on us all.

Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/10/16

The desperately impoverished residents of Hootin’ Holler are of course almost completely cut off from the mainstream American economy, but they keep in tenuous touch with the outside world via radio and thus have an extremely tenuous idea of what it’s like out there, with heartbreaking results.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/20/16

I guess the point of this comic is that … cruel bullying doesn’t stop in high school, but will continue well into your adult life? And women are more likely to use mockery and social exclusion than out-and-out violence in their bullying? Of course, this is lawless, feud-ridden Hootin’ Holler; as Mabel’s clenched fists in the final panel demonstrate, this confrontation is going to to get violent soon enough.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/20/16

You know, I joke about all the old people drama in Rex Morgan, M.D., but to be fair, this strip is one of the only bits of pop culture that actually treats the lives of the elderly as interesting and worthy of dramatization, which I definitely approve of! Still, today’s strip is here to remind us that, while old people may in many ways be vibrant, intriguing human beings, in other ways they’re crumbling, feeble, and on the verge of death.

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Spider-Man, 3/19/16

I genuinely neither know nor want to know what is going on below Spider-Man’s waist in panel two here. The relative ability to rotate your femur bones all the way around of … a spider? Anyway, this is nicely distracting us from the fact that, when running to find his wife only in the company of a guy who already knows his secret identity, Peter Parker feels obliged to abruptly put on his spider-suit. It makes him feel safe, and powerful!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/19/16

Parson Tuttle may be a grifter, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t experience pangs of conscience now and then. That’s why his wife is always there, to keep him on the plan! Those fancy hats aren’t gonna pay for themselves!

Dennis the Menace, 3/19/16

In the end, this is the most effective way the old can menace the young: by letting them know that the long life they have ahead of them will be filled with disappointments.