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Mary Worth, 7/8/25

“God damn it,” you’ve probably said to yourself, repeatedly over the past few months, “Are we going to get a non-Weston recurring character in Mary Worth at some point, or are we trapped in some kind of No Exit-style hell with Wilbur and Dawn specifically?” Well, good news: Olive is back, everybody! Johnnys-[gender neutral]-come-lately may not remember that Olive was a little girl who lived at Charterstone, who had psychic powers and maybe talked to angels, though that could’ve all been a side effect of her “tummy brain.” She was largely neglected by her parents because they were so horny, though they did try to have her special powers removed by a doctor, but he later turned out to be a junkie, so they ended up not doing that after all. Then they moved to New York, and usually when people leave Charterstone and/or Mary’s immediate field of vision they’re dead to her, but she actually visited Olive in the Big Apple and bought her a watch, and also checked in with a guy she had previously sexually rejected in the context of high-stakes cake-baking competition, but that’s not really related to Olive so we’ll forget that for now. Anyway, Mary’s going back to New York City, baby! What psychic adventures will she and Olive get up to? Will she meet up with another former beau, possibly handsome Broadwaysman Ken Kensington, who she flirted with on a different trip to New York while Jeff was busy saving lives in Vietnam or whatever and only didn’t hook up with because New York’s traffic was simply too scary for her. I am excited, obviously! Very excited! Wilbur better not fuck this one up, somehow!

Dennis the Menace, 7/8/25

I’m not sure if Henry’s facial expression here is meant to indicate “Jesus Christ, George, what exactly are you doing with my son that’s causing a repetitive motion injury” or “Jesus Christ, George, I’m leaving at this hour of the morning specifically so I don’t have to talk to anybody, why are you talking to me about Dennis, who I very much do not want to think or talk about”

Bizarro, 7/8/25

Wait, so human skeletons are also the grim reapers for reptiles and insects? That’s not right. I object both on philosophical grounds and because seeing a drawing of a mayfly skeleton in a cloak would’ve been much funnier.

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Beetle Bailey, 7/2/25

Longtime readers know that one of my minor Beetle Bailey fixations is that Miss Buxley’s classic little black dress is actually a little red dress; it’s just that the daily strips depict black and white versions of underlying platonic forms that are in color, and red is depicted as black in that context, but then the strips are colored in by other hands later in the manufacturing chain, which screws up the whole system because the black apparently can’t be made red at that point. Or it least it couldn’t be made red, until today! Finally, Adobe Photoshop fill tool technology has advanced to the point where it can make the black area of a .tiff file red. Unfortunately it seems to screw up a bunch of other stuff, like make the text too small for the word bubbles and also kind of fuck up Miss Buxley’s face. It looks off, right? Is this AI? Will Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC be the first comics conglomerate to replace its human artists with AI? Anyway, I was going to do a riff here about the fact that “going pillow shopping” clearly seems like it should be a sex thing, but I got distracted by all this other stuff.

Bizarro, 7/2/25

Look, man, I love dogs. Huge fan of dogs. But the truth is, no dog, not even a highly trained one, would give even a moment’s thought to a beautiful sunset vista. This guy should be getting a phone call describing the incredible smells coming off a huge pile of turds that the dog found.

Hi and Lois, 7/2/25

Hey, Trixie, the Sun is an enormous ball of exploding hydrogen and helium more than 800,000 miles in diameter, and its motion is mostly determined by the gravitational forces of our galaxy, which contains millions of stars like it. You, on the other hand, are a baby with no job or anything else that imposes any kind of schedule on your days, so maybe you should be willing to accommodate your supposed “best friend.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/2/25

Aww, isn’t that nice? But seriously, insulin deliveries to Hootin’ Holler are intermittent at best, which is a big problem considering the community’s higher-than-average incidence of diabetes.

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Pluggers, 5/12/25

Man, the facial expressions in this one really make it, and by “make it” I mean “make it clear what a grim marital scene these two will be enduring for the rest of their lives.” Obviously the focus is on how the kangaroo lady is willing to go into bug-eyed urinary discomfort if it means she gets to experience a few more precious minutes spent not watching sports, but don’t ignore the bear man’s hooded eyes: he’s very much aware of what’s going on and is seething that his wife is willing to go to such lengths to stymie his desires. The really sad thing is that this plugger couple has also brought us “bear man wants to watch TV even though kangaroo lady is desperate to leave the house and do literally anything else” and “bear man is going to get kangaroo lady so drunk that she passes out so he can watch what he wants, and he considers this better than sex,” so this isn’t even the most depressing TV-related glimpse into this marriage that this trip has provided us with. Anyway, if the kangaroo lady really wants to keep the TV tuned to her channel while she’s in the bathroom, she could just take the remote with her. Obviously the bear man could get up off the couch and change the channel, but trust me, he is not going to get off the couch and change the channel.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/12/25

Look, I don’t want to minimize how scary it would be for the police to incorrectly suspect you of murder, but the length of time during which the police incorrectly suspected Augie of murder started when the beat cop showed up on the scene and decided to do as little work as possible and mostly ended when the homicide detective showed up and decided the stalker had been murdered by drugs, and then the whole thing was definitively put to rest when the real murderer called the cops and was like “actually it wasn’t a drug overdose, it was murder, and I, not Augie, am the murderer.” It’s always hard to tell how long things take in the comics but the first part took maybe an hour and I believe the second part was wrapped up by the end of that night? “A while” is really stretching things, is what I’m saying here.

Mary Worth, 5/12/25

The big narrative tension in this storyline is that we know that Belle is a murderous psycho and Dawn suspects but cannot prove that Belle is a murderous psycho, but it’s not clear if Wilbur thinks Belle is completely normal or is ignoring obvious warning signs because he is desperate for sex. I kind of feel like today’s strip points towards option two, as Wilbur does not take the obvious opportunity to have Belle come over to Mary’s apartment for a muffin sesh, indicating that he clearly knows such a scenario would end very badly. However, he’s not smart enough to realize that the arrival of the latest issue of Fish Fancy might lead Belle to realize how emotionally involved he is with his fish, which could be bad news for Willa.

Bizarro, 5/12/25

Hey, how do you think this ghost is going to get that cereal inside his body? Will he just dump it in through one of his eye holes? Will that interfere with looking at his phone? Sorry to dig into the details like this, but we’re all going to be dead someday and I honestly would like to know as much as possible about the mechanics in advance.