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Mary Worth, 10/6/21

“Bonjour, mes amis! Eet ees your old friend Pierre here, and today I find myself in a conundrum that would baffle even my countryman Jean Baudrillard! For what, in zees strange parc chien, is real, and what is a seemulacrum? Zees fire hydrant, for instance: nowhere close to any beeldeengs, presumably not connected to zee plumbing, existing only as a wheemsical reminder of zee urban spaces zees park dwellers have rejected! Where once dogs, like people, lived in embedded in a shared urban landscape and repurposed its functional artifacts for their own uses — making water, in zee case of zee hydrants — now we reside in a suburban form, in which activities are segmented by geography, and space has been set aside only for dogs to run and peess. And yet some part of zees people, zees new breed of Homo suburbicus, longs for the city they can only deemly remember, and zo zey put up zees false fire hydrant as a sort of memento mori for a lost way of life! And zees other dog, zees lady Frenchie — uncannily like myself, as eef my very essence was captured, copied, fleeped 180 degrees, recolored, and given some feminine seegnifiers! Truly a baffling experience, like barking into a mirror! At least it is deestracting me from Weelbur’s flirting. When the man adopted me, I thought, ‘Surely I will never have to weetness this man making love to another human being,’ but I may have been meestaken! A troubling prospect, non?”

Daddy Daze, 10/6/21

This may be my favorite Daddy Daze yet, in that it gets to what I believe to be the true heart of the strip, which is that the Daddy Daze daddy is in fact a sad, lonely man slipping into insanity and the Daddy Daze baby is really beside the point, except insomuch as his mother will have to care for him full time once his father goes truly around the bend. Note that in today’s strip there’s not even a pretense that the Daddy Daze baby is using his “ba” language to participate in whatever madness his father has going on.

Judge Parker, 10/6/21

Hey, remember when April went to prison? And then later, when Judge Parker senior went to prison? Well, what if everybody in this strip goes to prison, eventually?

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Gil Thorp, 9/15/21

[clears throat] [extremely Beavis from Beavis and Butt-Head voice] FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! [takes a long, deep breath, representing the years 2016, 2017, and 2018, when the annual Milford bonfire was mysteriously absent] FIRE! FIRE!

Whew, it’s bonfire time again, everybody, guaranteeing a robust grain harvest and fewer barren wombs among the townsfolk! Every year we learn a little something new about the bonfire, and today’s panel one shows us that, assuming the student body doesn’t shlep all those logs by hand to some open field somewhere, it takes place a lot closer to the school itself than I would’ve guessed. Legend has it that Milford will only win a state championship if the flame is allowed to burn the building to the ground!

Funky Winkerbean, 9/15/21

One of the running jokes in the early days of this strip, when it was mostly fun gags about a bunch of goofy teens, was that Les Moore wielded a machine gun as part of his hall monitor duties. I keep waiting in the post-Turn-to-Grim Funkyverse for this to get retconned into the result of some awful school shooting, and that hasn’t happened yet, but until then I’ll console myself with “Majorette Holly’s flesh was a mass of scar tissues due to ever-more-dangerous baton tricks her deranged mother forced her to perform.” I guess today’s colorist glanced at the text and thought, “Oh, these pictures are all supposed to be close-ups of burn wounds, huh,” which is a nice touch.

Daddy Daze, 9/15/21

Look, man, I spent several hours with a couple babies this past weekend and they didn’t seem happy at all! They cried multiple times just because they had to go to the bathroom or were hungry or whatever. I mean, I had to go to the bathroom and was hungry too, but I managed to hold it together, for once!

Mary Worth, 9/15/21

WILBUR WHEN A CAT PISSES IN HIS SPOT ON HIS GIRLFRIEND’S COUCH: Animals are bad! They interfere with me having sex!

WILBUR WHEN HE HEARS A GNOMISH OLD MAN MET A NICE WOMAN JUST BECAUSE HE OWNS A DOG: Animals can help you get sex? Go on, Mary, I’m very interested.

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Daddy Daze, 9/12/21

Guys, look. I never wanted to have a non-trivial percentage of my waking hours haunted by thoughts of what caused the marriage of the Daddy Daze daddy and the Daddy Daze mommy to unravel. I didn’t ask for this life. And yet here we are! This pair had this baby, who is … well, I’m still not entirely certain how old the Daddy Daze baby is supposed to be, but he literally can be cupped in one of the Daddy Daze daddy’s hands, so he can’t be that old, and so they were clearly together (or at least “together,” nudge wink) not that long ago! And obviously they’re modeling a good amicable post-divorce co-parenting situation for the readers at home, but I for one am not buying it! What’s the drama here? Does the Daddy Daze daddy want to get back together with the Daddy Daze mommy? Today’s strip certainly points in that direction, in my opinion! Does this mean the whole thing where he purports to interpret his infant son’s babbling as coherent language is nothing more than a bit to amuse his ex and maybe, maybe, worm his way back into her heart? I had always assumed that this ongoing pantomime got its start when some combination of loneliness and sleep deprivation had simply shattered his mind, but this is quite frankly an even more depressing and pathetic explanation.

Panel from The Lockhorns, 9/12/21

This is actually a decent joke, but I frankly don’t think it fits Leroy’s character very well. I refuse to believe that even in high school he was either earnest enough to join the marching band or socially skilled enough to make friends.