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Mary Worth, 5/8/20

Floatin heads are, of course, a beloved Mary Worth tradition, so well established that they have their own category in the annual Worthy Awards. Today’s is a particular delight. Dawn’s fantasy Jared isn’t contained in a thought balloon, but is rather emerging from a cloud bank as she flies back from the East Coast, and while it’s always hard to judge the relative size of cloud formations, I think we have to assume that this Jared is hundreds of feet tall and regarding Dawn’s plane serenely while floating thousands of feet in the air. Since she has such an active imagination, it’s no surprise Dawn hasn’t bothered to, say, pay for in-flight wi-fi, which she could’ve used to get in touch with Jared and let him know the she isn’t going to dump him or anything.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/8/20

Parson Tuttle is, as longtime readers of this blog know, a phony who’s wholly unlearned in Christian theology and philosophy and is only acting as a clergyman as a grift. Today’s he taking the day off from the scam, so he can relax, ignore the bogus Christian god, and commune with his true objects of worship: the uncanny scaly mer-deities who live beneath the waters, sleeping dreamless for eons, waiting for the day when they’ll rise up and annihilate us.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/25/20

I think we’ve hit the uncanny valley segment of “comics do coronavirus,” where strips start throwing in catchphrases increasingly prevalent in public discourse to generate “ah ha, I recognize that” laugh-like reactions without actually trying to grapple with actual context these phrases come from. Thus you get Snuffy joking about the “stimulus package” the U.S. government is putting together to counteract the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic without anyone in Hootin’ Holler actually changing their behavior in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Of course, Snuffy and his neighbors are the last people you’d expect to submit to the revenooers’ orders on how they should live their lives, but it’s also possible that they’re safe because the government long ago simply walled Hootin’ Holler off from the rest of the country, for their protection and for ours.

Daddy Daze, 4/25/20

I know I’ve already discussed my theory that the Daddy Daze coffeeshop strips are just updated versions of the bar strips in every other syndicated newspaper comic. Today’s offering features a very despondent Daddy Daze Daddy’s Goth Twin, guzzling his coffee as he contemplates a parenting style that, it seems clear, has already ruined his child’s life, and I’m basically assuming at this point that these strips were all drawn to take place in a bar and then forcibly changed to a coffee shop by editorial intervention.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/25/20

“Finally! White people are back on top in this town! White people with normal names, like ‘Mason Jarre!’”

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Crankshaft, 4/22/20

Crankshaft is once again returning to a favorite (?) theme, “Boy, people at Book Fairs sure are annoying, aren’t they?” Annoying enough to … murder? Maybe, if Lillian’s book title is any indication! Why would you antagonize someone at a book fair who specifically wrote about murdering people at book fairs? Move along to the next table, annoying lady, before it’s too late for you!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/22/20

But boys! Without this moment of mind-shattering terror you can never go through the transformation that causes you to become the Bat-Man! You’re abandoning your project just when you’re at the precipice of the psychological shift crucial to the character you’re trying to emulate! I sure hope you haven’t gone to all the trouble of having your parents murdered in front of you only to back out of this now!