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Mary Worth, 2/26/19

Oh my God this elderdating plot is going to involved a nonstop parade of wizened, horny old men who lied about their age on their dating profile slouching lustily at Estelle and I am extremely here for it. Very excited for this rugged, weathered gentleman to explain that the “old” was a typo and he meant to say that he’d been a widower ever since his wife died of natural causes 63 years ago.

Gil Thorp, 2/26/19

I’m not sure why Marty’s latest crusade to get Gil fired is so different from every other campaign he’s ever waged to get Gil fired that he feels obliged to personally and insincerely apologize to Mimi about it when he runs into her public. I do, however, absolutely love the image of him so gobsmacked that he just stands there, holding his mug of delicious, frosty beer at waist level. Maybe it’s a precursor to him dropping it to the floor in shock, which I’m imagining now happening in slow motion! Anyway, my favorite person in today’s strip is actually the eavesdropping dude in panel one who’s looking at the reader with an expression that says “I come here for the happy hour drinks and appetizers but I stay for the drama.”

Beetle Bailey, 2/26/19

Ha ha, computer nerd Chip Gizmo, who’s supposed to be installing Microsoft Office and making sure staff officers’ computers don’t have too much porn malware on them, thinks he’s a real soldier and is fighting the “enemy” — with computers! What an extremely silly scenario that definitely isn’t happening in real life!

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Blondie, 2/15/19

Look, while it’s conventional wisdom that legacy strips somehow remain lucrative enough to pay ghost writers and other gagsmiths, I don’t have any specific knowledge of what goes on behind any particular strip. Officially, Blondie has been written by Dean Young, son of strip creator Chic Young, since 1973 — literally as long as I’ve been alive — and beyond that one can only speculate. Still, I recognize creative exhaustion when I see it; all I can say is that back in 2005 whoever was behind the strip was still enjoying themselves, coming with absurd names for characters like Glambaster just for the sheer silliness of it. But now, fourteen years later, it’s a different, and much grimmer story. “These people, uh, they don’t like it when you’re late. What should we call them. Uh. Time. Clock. Clock … ers? Clockers. There. Done. What was that, Friday’s strip? Just one more to go for the week, thank Christ.”

Beetle Bailey, 2/15/19

I once was a groomsman in a Catholic wedding where the sermon started off nice and went quite long, and I tuned out for a little bit and then when I started listening again the priest was in the middle of a story about how his parents has a huge fight with each other at a McDonald’s because they couldn’t fully love each other because they didn’t love Jesus. “This seems like an odd childhood story to dig up in this context,” I thought, but then it became clear that I had missed the setup and the fight had actually happened less than a month prior to the wedding, at which point I thought “This just seems to reflect badly on your persuasive powers as a professional clergyman, Father.” Anyway, should Chaplain Staneglass have advised Beetle and Sarge that fellowship in Christ might improve their relationship rather than just telling them tautologically “you’d be nicer to each other if you were nicer to each other”? Maybe, since you’d think he would have some sense of how profoundly emotionally damaged Sarge is and realize that heavy spiritual artillery is in order.

Gil Thorp, 2/15/19

We all of course remember B/Robby Howley, the student basketball manager who perpetrated the entirely victimless crime of hooking a player up with fake Adderral, who for his trouble was banished to the rec center and would grow up to become twisted and hell-bent on revenge. But whatever happened to Max Bacon, the other participant in that transaction, the one who incessantly badgered and guilt-tripped poor B/Robby who finally came up with his hare-brained fake pill scheme just to get him off his back? He’s grown a beard and stopped bleaching his hair and is totally still in Gil’s good graces when he comes back to his old high school to yuck it up! Remember, it’s natural for an athlete to use any means necessary to compete at the highest level, and it’s the moral responsibility of those around them to not fulfill their expressed wishes.

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Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody! Which of today’s valentine-themed comics is the most depressing?

Blondie, 2/14/19

Is it Blondie, where the title character is an eternally youthful bombshell yet still needs to go to increasingly grotesque lengths to elicit the sexual interest of her food-obsessed husband?

Beetle Bailey, 2/14/19

Is it Beetle Bailey, where the title character has fallen asleep and his girlfriend is using him like a sex doll, but for feelings? (I somehow find the glass on the end table here particularly evocative; I assume Beetle, committed to never ingesting any stimulant that might impede his ability to doze off, took a few sips of room temperature tap water before slipping into blessed unconsciousness mid-date.)

Mark Trail, 2/14/19

Is it Mark Trail, where Cherry wistfully remembers the time where there were romance comic strips, the sort of comic strips where a character might get her emotional and physical needs met once in a while, you know?

Six Chix, 2/14/19

Is it Six Chix, where this lady is on a date with a sock puppet? You know, the extremely normal and relatable situation where you meet someone and they turn out to be a human arm inside a sock that has eyes sewed on it?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/14/19

In fact, to find true emotional fulfillment in today’s strips, we need to go beyond the world of traditional romantic attachment. For instance, imagine that you’re a ham radio operator who lives out in a desolate wasteland. Not a lot of opportunities to go on dates out there, of course. But now imagine a plane full of people suddenly arrives, their cell phones useless. They need to be able to communicate with the outside world somehow … using some kind of radio apparatus … perhaps one operated on an amateur basis. This is it. The moment has arrived. Other people dream about the day they stand at the altar, before their family and friends, to be united forever with their beloved. You’ve been dreaming about this.