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Mary Worth, 4/12/21

Finally, finally, we are blessedly moving on from Saul and Eve’s emotional process and starting a new storyline in Mary Worth, and hell yeah it involves Dr. Drew Corey, the son Mary’s semi-boyfriend Dr. Jeff Corey! You may best remember Dr. Drew from that time Dawn decided to romance him, and he was receptive but also happened to be dating another lady at the same time, which earned him a thorough slapping that haunted him literally for years. He seemed like he had learned some valuable lessons from that episode and we haven’t heard much from him since, so it’s exciting to learn that he’s still kind of a dick. “Every day brings an interesting mix of ills! Get it, dad? Because they all have some terrible disease, poor bastards. Good thing Dr. Drew is here to help them! Or not, whatever, I get paid either way, it turns out.”

Dick Tracy, 4/12/21

Speaking of new storylines, we’re finally done with Dick Tracy’s hippie nonsense and have moved onto a new storyline here as well, which seems to involve a prisoner who, based on her pallor and catchy nickname, is clearly deceased. I guess it’s no surprise that in the carceral Neo-Chicago police state, not even death can keep you out of the clutches of the punitive justice system.

Crankshaft, 4/12/21

Wow, after some vaguely pandemic-presaging strips a few weeks ago, it looks like Crankshaft is going to leapfrog over the last year-plus of our lives entirely and just skip to “gosh, remember the pandemic, that was crazy,” huh? I’m of two minds about this: it could’ve really brightened my 2020 if I had been constantly wondering who in Crankshaft’s friend group of terrible old people was going to die of COVID, though I ultimately would’ve been bitterly disappointed when the answer turned out to be “none of them.”

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Hagar the Horrible, 4/1/21

Happy April Fool’s Day, everyone! Say, were you concerned that the creative team behind today’s Hagar the Horrible believed that an olive tree might realistically grow out of an olive left floating in a martini glass over a single evening? Well, rest assured: that little sign being held by a tentacle is here to let you know that this is just a seasonally appropriate jest, and we’ll be getting back to this strip’s ultra-realistic medieval Norse setting tomorrow. (The creative team also knows that squid and octopuses do not hold signs this way; the tentacle is itself a secondary April Fool’s joke.)

Crankshaft, 4/1/21

These two twins have been volunteering to help Lillian with the unpermitted bookstore she runs over her garage for years now, and they’ve finally won her trust enough that they can start scamming her. And good for them!

Mary Worth, 4/1/21

Well, now that we’ve established that dogs are good, I guess we can finally move forward to the next storyline, and … OH NO SAUL DID YOU LET HER SEE A HEADLESS BESUITED MANNEQUIN, this is going to trigger another panic attack and at least another six weeks of this plotline, please, we had almost made it out of this one

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Crankshaft, 3/18/21

Oh, it turns out that this strip was setting up a Christopher Nolan-style chronologically disjointed narrative in this week’s Crankshaft, where each strip pushes back further into the past to peel open another layer of the story. How do I feel about this bold storytelling experiment, you may ask? Well, it’s ending (beginning?) with Crankshaft in significant physical pain, so I’m feeling pretty good about it, actually.

Mark Trail, 3/18/21

The finally-wrapped-up initial New Model Mark Trail storyline established that there are multiple generations of Mark Trials (Marks Trail?), which I guess raises the question of which of the strip’s adventures had which generation Trail as the protagonist? Well, it turns out the rerun we got right before the reboot, where Mark refused to attend an industry awards ceremony to tend to his sick dog but ended up winning anyway, was totally this guy. Maybe if he had shown up in person he would’ve gotten the real award, crafted from the finest pewter crystal, rather than the cheap lightweight glass version they sent him to save on shipping costs.

Dennis the Menace, 3/18/21

The true menace here is that, no doubt by some combination of threats and endless whining, Dennis has convinced his parents to serve bloody, raw hamburger for dinner tonight. What’s the matter, Henry and Alice? Not hungry? You’ve barely touched your plates!