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Mary Worth, 7/8/23

Huh, I guess the way that Mary is going to help out the police is to take to the streets herself as a cold-hearted vigilante who doesn’t abide by “the rules” that say it’s illegal to feed Lyle Lovett to his own fighting dogs while he begs for mercy. I’m not sure we ever expected to see Mary go stone cold killer in this strip — she usually passive-aggressively gets others to do her dirty work for her — but nobody ever messed around with people’s dogs before in her presence. (Mary would kill for dogs, but would never be so gauche as to actually have one in her home, due to all her delicate knickknacks and furniture coverings and such.)

Dennis the Menace, 7/8/23

I’m loving how Dennis took something insanely wholesome — enjoying some quality time with his dad at an old-fashioned soda fountain — and made it at least moderately menacing. What about nutrition, dad? Did you ever think of that? Eh? Early onset type 2 diabetes? Eh? Eh?

Crock, 7/8/23

What do you suppose that Crock (the character) and/or Crock (the creative team behind the syndicated newspaper comics strip) think a migraine is? Discuss.

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Crock, 5/2/23

Clearly a lot of Crock strips will have you saying “What on earth is going on here,” but today’s Crock really has me saying, “No, really, what on earth is going on here?” I guess we’re meant to understand that the French Foreign Legion’s militarized colonial regime makes a mockery of the rights to free speech as laid out in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, but it’s very funny that the way this is conveyed is by having Crock declare that “signs are illegal!” And honestly, this angle just seems like it’s adding unnecessary confusion to a joke about how Grossie is protesting (?) something in a hypocritical way, but the engine for that middle panel’s gotta come from somewhere, I guess.

Mary Worth, 5/2/23

Wait, did we know that Dr. Ed was widowed? I don’t think we did, and I am enjoying Estelle carefully composing a neutral position for her facial features as she processes this information and begins to grasp that Ed’s issues might go a bit beyond “burned out at work.” Just another successful Mary Worth romantic yoga session!

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Folks, we need to start off on a sad note: Dennis Lien, who for many years posted in the comments here as Shrug, passed away last week under hospice care. He was a great force for good vibes on this site and he will really be missed!

Blondie, 4/17/23

Dagwood can tell Alexander is “getting serious” romantically because he’s wearing “clothes that fit,” like a monocolored t-shirt that he carefully tucks into his belted khakis. The extent to which this comic doesn’t understand teenagers manages to go even beyond the extent to which it doesn’t understand adults, which is really saying something.

Gil Thorp, 4/17/23

MILFORD GEOGRAPHY ALERT: today we establish definitively that Milford is in the “pop” zone, and while this encompasses a broad swath of the United States, from the Great Lakes to the Great Plains to Rockies to the Pacific Northwest, it seems to definitively cut out other commonly cited location possibilities, like Connecticut. Sadly, Hoo Dad’s Root Beer does not appear to be a real regional product that we could use to narrow things down further, but I will provide more data on this as it comes in.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/17/23

If you’re curious about what educational and intellectual life in Hootin’ Holler is like, I’d like to point out that Jughaid is thumbing through what appears to be an unbound six-page leaflet about volcanos, which I assume has been written by hand.

Crock, 4/17/23

Oh look, today’s Crock rerun is a joke about, uh, children getting married to adults? Here’s hopin that this is what it finally takes to get Crock cancelled (I will accept either the modern “cancel culture” sense of the word or the more traditional “they stop running it newspapers” sense, whatever it takes).