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Folks, before we jump into me making fun of today’s comics, I wanted point you to an article I wrote about comics elsewhere! I talked to a bunch of comics artists about their decision to acknowledge — or ignore — the coronvirus pandemic’s effect on our everday lives, and it turned into a meditation on how time and history intersect with the ephemeral medium of newspaper comics. Check it out over on Polygon!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/11/20

We’re fully a week and a half into this “Rex tells Sarah about how he and June met” storyline and June hasn’t even shown up yet, and are you feeling, bored, huh? Do you think this storyline, and Rex Morgan, M.D., storylines in general, move too slowly? Do you wish they’d just get to the point already? Well, it sounds like you’re a big whiny baby, and not a cool supergenius baby who can figure out how to blackmail people, but a dumb baby who had amnesia and now doesn’t know anything anymore. Do you want to be a dumb baby? Do you? No? Then shut up and let this strip set up “context” for the next six to eight weeks, buddy.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/11/20

OK, there are kids of suffering that awful characters in Funky Winkerbean endure that I like and kinds of suffering that I don’t, and I’ve decided that this is the first kind. Do it, Mason! Watch the special secret tapes that were emotionally intimate and only for Les! Strip-mine his personal agony to make a virtuous but unwatchable movie, which is worse than Les strip-mining it himself to produce three virtuous but unreadable books, for some reason! Use Lisa’s corpse to burnish your millionaire action hero status with some indie cred and further your career! Take no prisoners!

Beetle Bailey, 6/11/20

Plato’s “Science Facts” pamphlet is four pages long, including the cover, which is an otherwise blank page that just has “Science Facts” written on it. This is one the saddest things I’ve ever seen.

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Beetle Bailey, 6/4/20

Being a general is a decently big deal. And yeah, technically, when I say “general” I mean “general officer”; only a four-star is truly a “general,” amd Halftrak is a one-star Brigadier General, but the point remains: by law there can be no more than 231 in the Army as a whole, which is more than I expected but still isn’t a lot. What I’m trying to say is that this comic strip inspired me to read the “general officer” article on Wikipedia and click on several of the links therein, and I definitely learned quite a bit but also came across nothing that altered my original thought here, which is that it’s probably kind of concerning that General Halftrack’s staff is just forging his signature on things.

Mary Worth, 6/4/20

After what I’m pretty sure were seven solid weeks of Dawn’s love triangle concluding in the dullest way possible, this week’s storyline has given me serious whiplash as it zigs and zags through various possibilities! Is it about Toby failing as a baker? Is it about Saul Wynter’s dying family? Or is it about the god-damn millennials [aide whispers in my ear] ahem, I have been informed that many millennials are now well into their 30s at this point and they’re calling the new crop of kids “zoomers,” so, as I was saying, is it about the god-damn zoomers, always staring at their phones and swearing and disrespecting their elders, who never did any such thing? Is Mary gonna have to teach this tween terror some respect?

Mark Trail, 6/4/20

Folks, as prophesied, it’s time for an Andy story in Mark Trail! The story so far is that Andy accidentally got closed up in the back of this truck, which drove far away from Lost Forest, and now appears to be ready to maul the hapless truck driver to death. Sorry, truck driver! It wasn’t your fault Andy wandered into your truck, but you will be suffering the consequences!

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Dick Tracy, 5/30/20

[I take an extremely deep breath so that I can wrap up the current boring-ass storyline in one run-on sentence] So Shaky got arrested but then later got bailed out by this woman who’s going to be playing Breathless Mahoney in a movie and I guess is a relative of the real Breathless Mahoney, who was lovers with the original Shaky, and even though Shaky has a perfectly nice girlfriend, I guess he and Breathless Jr. here are gonna do it? It hasn’t been an “interesting” journey to this point by any means, but when a woman in the newspaper comics asks one of Dick Tracy’s freakish villains “So, you’re basically a human vibrator, right?” I feel honor-bound to report it to you.

Beetle Bailey, 5/30/20

Man, I’m so steamed over Beetle calling Killer his “buddy” — I can’t cite any specific strips or anything but my strong impression is that they tolerate one another but have no real strong feelings about each other either for good or ill — that I can’t even focus on the fact that Sarge has started pitting the men under his command against one another in sport combat, for his amusement.

Shoe, 5/30/20

I don’t … think that would work? I’m really pretty sure that wouldn’t work.