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Blondie, 5/31/15

This is an extremely disappointing Blondie because we haven’t been privy at all to the drama that led up to it: the joy of reaching the big tournament shattered as Dagwood is yanked from the team, the friendship betrayed, Dagwood’s sense of self-worth destroyed. When the phone starts saying “Herb Woodley” in its robot voice (are there real phones that do this? because that sounds terrifying and awful), we should feel the pent up rage and frustration that Dagwood feels. It would make the pathos of the final row of panels — in which Dagwood’s resentment dissolves into pathetic gratitude at being a backup selection — all the more intense, and the sting of Herb’s final panel contempt all the sharper.

Panels from Mary Worth, 5/31/15

Oh, whoops, looks like Terry physically blocking Adam’s proposal was just a necessary step along the road that will lead to their inevitable marriage. As you can see in panel two, Terry is becoming increasingly unmoored from reality, not even able to trust the evidence of her own senses, which will make her helpless to resist Adam’s advances.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/31/15

“It’ll be fun to watch her try to be nice to people! It’s probably going to be super hard for her. She should just pretend to be nice, like I did to her a couple panels back. It was really easy! Say, I forget, am I the sympathetic character in this storyline?”

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Crock, 5/3/15

Though Crock is pretty obviously supposed to take place in some version of the French Foreign Legion in some version of colonial North Africa, it’s pretty rare to get explicit clues like the French tricolor flying from the fort here. Today we learn that in a desperate attempt to hold onto its crumbling empire, France is employing child soldiers! Shame!

Blondie, 5/3/15

As excuses to hide a secret extramarital affair go, I would rate “oh no I was working on a complicated jigsaw puzzle with my male friend and we lost track of time look ha ha here are some puzzle pieces in my pocket, I’m definitely not making this up” as fairly unbelievable.

Mary Worth, 5/3/15

This week in Out-Of-Context Quotes From Inappropriate People That Arrived In Mary Worth Via Brainyquote.com Probably: self-described “transgressional fiction” author Chuck Palahniuk, most famous for writing Fight Club! Very excited to learn at the end of this two-week trial period whether Adam is a figment of Terry’s imagination or vice-versa.

Judge Parker, 5/3/15

Oh, hey, in all the excitement over Sophie’s dreams of warlordship, I forgot to mention how the whole confrontation with Dalton turned out! How it turned out was this: Sam offered to set up some kind of Skype connection so that Dalton could watch his daughter get married, and Dalton sheepishly calmed down. Now Abbey will have to pretend to enjoy watching this poor-person affair on the trailer park’s TV, assuming Sophie doesn’t decide to bomb it from space.

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Archie, 2/15/15

I know that there are basically like six character designs in Archie, but Archie’s barber looks an awful lot like an adult version of resident nerd Dilton, doesn’t he? I’d like to imagine that Dilton accidentally slipped backwards from the future due to some kind of time travel experiment, and that he’s trapped in the present without his equipment or true identity, forcing him to take a series of jobs he considers beneath him. “Dilton Doiley” is a local high school student, so this future version of him must only go by the alias “Mr. Barber.” His deep-seated rage over his so-called friends’ failure to recognize him, so obvious on his face here, leads him to lash out the only we he knows how: by giving them terrible haircuts.

Blondie, 2/15/15

Usually a Sunday strip’s throwaway panels are connected somehow to the main action, at least thematically. At first I thought the little vignette of Dagwood and Daisy returning from a walk was completely out of left field, but then I figured out what the theme of the strip was: that Dagwood and Blondie will do anything to avoid talking or listening to each other.

Mark Trail, 2/15/15

I for one am pretty psyched that Mark Trail is jettisoning boring nature facts in favor of “unnerving news.” Is an enormous grizzly bear stalking you from less than 100 yards away, right now? Probably!