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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/6/21

Sarah may have forgotten all her magical art skills due to her amnesia, but at least she still has the vague notion that artists use paint and brushes in their day-to-day work. Despite being a doctor’s daughter, the quotidian details of medicine are apparently unfamiliar to her. Doctors punch people, right? That’s how they get them to stop complaining about their various ailments? By knocking them unconscious with a fist to the jaw?

Mark Trail, 4/6/21

Over in Mark Trail, Mark’s offhand remark to Rusty that “crickets are land shrimp” went viral on Rusty’s TikTok BikBok, and so he’s flown to LA to do a hip-hop video with Reptiliannaire, a reptile-themed rapper. However, because I know a lot of people read Mark Trail for accurate information about flora and fauna, I find today’s strip irresponsible: I can assure you that you are not likely to step out of LAX and encounter an iguana in the backseat of the first car you enter in the “California reality.” (You will instead get into a Lyft that smells like weed.)

Mary Worth, 4/6/21

Hey, remember when Saul first showed up in Charterstone, and he was a rude jerk to everyone, and then then his dog died, and he was emotionally devastated, and also it turned out that many years ago his family forced him to give up his true love in order to marry someone else, and he literally fled in terror when Mary tried to get him to talk about his feelings, so eventually she just forced him to adopt a dog against his will? Well, he’s never been to therapy! What could he possibly gain from it? It’s for girls, mostly.

Blondie, 4/6/21

You ever look at some particularly weird character design choice in a legacy comic and think to yourself, “Enh, that’s just the ossified memory of some decades-old artistic style that sort of made sense in a former aesthetic and is too closely tied to the character to ditch now, it’s probably not worth thinking about.” Well, I regret to inform you that those design choices are very real and literal in the universe of the strip, and they make other characters in the strip horny. They are absolutely a sex thing. Huge apologies for breaking this to you like this, but I don’t believe in letting my readers live in a world of comforting lies.

Pluggers, 4/6/21

“Oh well,” you’re probably thinking after that one, “at least I don’t know much about pluggers’ peeing and pooping situation.” Well, I’ve got bad news on that front too.

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Blondie, 4/3/21

Not sure why but I’m very fixated on the choice to do a pink-to-blue gradient in the background here. Specifically, I’m very curious as to whether we’re looking at sunrise or sunset. Typically, Dagwood and Mr. Beasley the mailman crash into one another as Dagwood runs out the door in the morning to catch his carpool, but that usually happens because he’s running late, so it seems unlikely that our notorious snoozemeister would be up and around literally at the break of down. Mostly I’m curious as to whether the madness Mr. Beasley is displaying in today’s strip arises from beginning-of-day manic enthusiasm or end-of-day exhaustion verging on psychosis. I’m sure I could comb through hundreds of Blondie strips looking for clues as to the geographic orientation of the Bumstead home to determine whether we’re looking east or west here, but I’m proud to report that I’m not quite at that level of comics obsession.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/3/21

Man, this strip always does its best to extract grim laffs from its characters’ economically desperate situation, but “Snuffy begs Doc Pritchart to freeze his face into immobility with off-label botox, giving him a marginal advantage in the games of chance where the few circulating dollars in Hootin’ Holler are passed back and forth among the town’s impoverished residents” is really on another level.

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Dustin, 3/28/21

I was going to start this post with “Did … did the manufacturer of warfarin write this comic” and then do a whole riff about how this seven year old kid may not need a blood thinner but the geriatrics who represent the biggest cohort among newspaper comics reader just might, but then I checked out warfarin’s Wikipedia article and found out it’s a generic drug, so that doesn’t really work. It’s just funnier if you get to use the actual name of a pharmaceutical conglomerate, you know? Anyway, I also learned that the warfarin was originally developed as a rat poison, its most common side effect is “bleeding,” and it can also cause something called “purple toes syndrome,” so, honestly, it really does need some good press.

Blondie, 3/28/21

The premise of the main gag of this comic is pointless — why would Mr. Dithers need a drone to keep tabs on Dagwood when there’s literally an entire sector of the software industry dedicated to producing spyware that bosses can use to keep tabs on their workers? — but I have to admit I found the throwaway panels, in which Dagwood reacts to a video poker website with more excitement and engagement than he’s ever demonstrated towards his career or his family, haunting enough that today’s strip will stick with me for weeks.