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Mary Worth, 10/20/20

Folks, we got a real situation on our hands here, by which I mean we’re in that rare, golden period where every day’s Mary Worth is going to demand constant attention and analysis. Here’s Tommy’s old dirtbag buddy Vin, who, say what you will about a gap-toothed back-alley crackhead, but he immediately recognizes an old friend in a low emotional state and offers to share a hit or two of hard-earned crack cocaine, despite his clearly stated plan to consume the entire pipeful himself. Anyway, let’s give a big shoutout to new-ish Mary Worth artist June Brigman, who has successfully rendered a recognizable crack pipe, in contrast with Apartment 3-G, which featured characters smoking “rock” or maybe “dope” out of some sort of tube, or old-school Mary Worth, in which Tommy the dealer had a big brown bag o’ meth.

Shoe, 10/20/20

Wouldn’t have picked Shoe as the newspaper comic strip that was going to perfectly capture the mood of America in 2020, but, well, congrats to Shoe for perfectly capturing the mood of American in 2020!

Crankshaft, 10/20/20

Does … does Crankshaft think that “transporter” is trademarked but “Star Trek” isn’t

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Crankshaft, 9/7/20

HOT TV RECOMMENDATION FROM JOSH: I have been enjoying Trapped, an Icelandic mystery show set in a remote, isolated small town. It’s available to stream on Amazon Prime and watching it in Icelandic with English subtitles triggered a Remembrance of Things Past-style flashback to one of the many books I had as a kid in a genre that basically could be described as “Do You Have An Extremely Dorky Kid And Wikipedia Hasn’t Been Invented Yet? Here’s A Phonebook Sized Book Full Of Interesting Facts Without Really Anything By Way Of Organization,” which had a section on the Icelandic language, which is basically still Old Norse. It stayed archaic for so long because Iceland was historically so isolated, but as the modern age dawned, the country made a conscious effort to keep neologisms out of the language, using native words for new concepts instead; the example given in the book is the word for telephone, sími, which is based on a Norse word for thread, referring to telephone wires. This is funny to me in Trapped because people talk about phones all the time, and of course exclusively use the word to refer to cell phones, which use no thread at all! Anyway, this is just to say that I was enjoying some fun etymology stuff about words we use to talk about phones and how they work, and how they embed older, outdated notions into our current speech, until fuckin’ Crankshaft came by and ruined it with a dumb joke about “poking,” ugh.

Dick Tracy, 9/7/20

I am absolutely cackling at the image of Professor Stokes or whoever using this prototype vampire chassis and biting into some guy’s neck and starting to pump with its inadequate motor and the victim just being like “Hey, uh, what’s going on? That … that tickles, knock it off, guy. If you’re trying to drain my blood, you’re not doing it very well!”

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Crankshaft, 10/4/20

Hey, remember the last mayoral election in this town, when Ralph, who’s sitting there claiming he could never do what you need to do to run for mayor, ran for mayor? He lost, because Crankshaft, his campaign manager, forgot to vote for him, and it’s really a good thing, too, because here we are not even at the end of what would’ve been his first term and his brain is so addled he doesn’t even remember he ever ran. Sad!

Gasoline Alley, 10/4/20

I refuse to think about whether the Sunday and weekly Gasoline Alley strips are in the same “continuity” any longer than it will take me to type this sentence, but I will point out that today’s strip that has the vibe of “We’ve been closed for months due to coronavirus but now we’re open!” even though we’ve never seen anyone in the strip acknowledge the coronavirus. Anyway, it seems the pandemic was actually much worse in the Gasoline Alley universe, and the shattered remnants of society have been reduced to eating horsemeat.

Hi and Lois, 10/4/20

Chip’s emotional journey here is interesting but besides the point: these two suburban families have figured out a way to link their landholdings and create a stronger and more easily defensible bloc of territory via strategic matrimony, and so everybody involved just needs to get used to the idea.

Panel from The Lockhorns, 10/4/20

I absolutely love Leroy’s miserable facial expression here. He knows everyone hates him and hates what he’s doing, but he’s found himself committed to this bit against his own best instincts, with no way to back out.