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Mary Worth, 4/25/14

Oh, Mary! How could we ever doubt the nobility — and the complexity — of your intentions? It seems Mary never had any intention of meddling Tommy into a job at all. I mean, she’s not against Iris’s son finding gainful employment — whatever gets him out of Charterstone is fine by her! No, Mary is after something much, much more difficult than helping an ex-con with dumb hair find a fulfilling career: she’s trying to find love for Wilbur Weston. She recognized when Iris had reached the state of emotional desperation necessary to be receptive to Wilbur’s advances, and has even left the possibility open that Wilbur himself might help solve a difficult problem and thus boost his self-esteem. Truly, Mary never tires of challenging herself with seemingly impossible meddle-quests.

Blondie, 4/25/14

Speaking of awkward and weird, Dagwood is reading a broadsheet paper that features the 1754 Join, Or Die cartoon on the front page, for some reason? And he expects it to be of interest to an actual, literal five-year-old? Also, Elmo is only five, and yet his parents are never seen and he seems to wander freely back and forth through the neighborhood between the Bumsteads’ house and wherever it is he lives? This seems like a lot of trouble to go through to trash-talk Dan Piraro.

Apartment 3-G, 4/25/14

OK, we can all agree that Tommie and her pet deer needed to get out of the apartment and see some changed scenery, but the look of sly satisfaction on Jack’s face indicates that she’s stumbled onto some kind of BDSM scene here that I’m not sure is really what the doctor ordered, you know?

Dennis the Menace, 4/25/14

Bringing Joey into his mother’s bedroom and narrating the action as she stands paralyzed in terror by the unstoppable march of time and its effects on her body? I deem Dennis’s behavior today: pretty menacing!

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Judge Parker, 3/1/14

I was going to apologize for not keeping you up to date on the conversation between April and her dad, but then I realized that it’s literally lasted two weeks and can be easily summed up as follows: April’s dad is on the run from some Romanian weapons-smugglers he’s fallen out with, and now they’ve managed to plant a tracker on April’s car and are on their way to this impregnable jungle fortress/cancer research facility, presumably travelling via heavily armed helicopter gunship. Good times appear to be in the narrative hopper, though, if the sinister grin of bloodthirsty mercenary/cheerful groundskeeper “Abbott” as he promises that April and Randy’s wedding ceremony will not be unduly disturbed by the endless screaming of their enemies is any indication.

Blondie, 3/1/14

Nobody in this strip is what you’d call “introspective,” so I guess Elmo is as likely a candidate as any to stumble onto self-reflective questions of ontology. Dagwood, who can only dimly grasp the philosophical thought processes this line of questioning has provoked in his young pal, is probably wrong about what’s going on in that closet; it’s more likely that Elmo is just using the dark, warm space to go into a fetal position, having arrived much too quickly at the “why is there something instead of nothing” problem.

Spider-Man, 3/1/14

It’s good to see that New York’s criminal element has a clear-eyed perspective on exactly how much of a threat Spider-Man is to them (namely, not much).

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Pluggers, 2/22/14

“Reflective” is not usually a term we normally associate with pluggers, but you have to admit that there appears to be a certain amount of self-reflection going through this plugger-cat’s mind as he stares at his pill container. Self-reflection and regret. “Boy, reefer and LSD sure seemed real scary back in college,” he thinks. “Seemed real important to keep away. These things are safer. That’s what they tell you. The government says so, so I guess it must be true. D’you think the guys who smoked grass are taking any more of these pills today than I am? Or the gals?” He thinks about a girl from his junior year, who had been in his math class — he never was very good at math, and she used to help him with some of the problem sets sometimes — and how he saw her at that party, and she smiled when she saw him and tried to hand him a doobie, or whatever they called it, and he stuttered and made an excuse and left, then avoided eye contact with her for the rest of the semester. What do you suppose she was up to? Did she have a daily pill organizer too? Did she ever get married? Was she on the Facebook? What was her name, again?

Blondie, 2/22/14

Blondie has been serving up non-stop Olympics jokes pretty much since the Games started, each cornier and more Olympo-sycophantic than the last, to the extent that I’m now just completely assuming that a fair amount of money changed hands between the International Olympic Committee and whatever Cayman Islands holding corporation owns the rights to Blondie’s intellectual property.

Hagar the Horrible, 2/22/14

It’s Hagar the Horrible! He’s just like you, except that he lives in a anarchic, violent, Hobbesian hellscape.