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Mary Worth, 4/12/19

Estelle is of course ludicrously deep in the Denial phase here, but I do enjoy the fact that her immediate response to a complete lack of any information about “Arthur Zerro” online is “He never said he was famous!” Imagine if the Internet were only for famous people! Like, if only famous people were on there! And every time you encountered some jackass going viral for a bad tweet or a dumb [checks Late 2010s Internet Sites for Dummies and Gen-Xers] Tik Tok, you would just assume that, well, if I keep hearing about them, they must be famous for legitimate reasons! Like they must be a movie star or an author or at least a small-town mayor! Certainly normal people wouldn’t have their information online! Why would they? Why, that would imply that information about me would be online, for anyone to see, and that’s frankly horrifying!

Dennis the Menace, 4/12/19

OK, so, we joke a lot, but, “Oh, so you won’t let me bring my dog into this restaurant? Well, guess what, buddy: you’re my dog now” is profoundly menacing.

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Family Circus, 4/7/19

This is maybe one of the darkest Family Circuses I’ve ever seen! Let’s take a look at each of the portrayed fates of the lovers, clockwise from the left:

• Dude in prison
• 25 happily married years
• Dude watches TV with a buzz on while his wife hunches next to him uncomfortably
• Dude brings flower in from garden
• Old couple making out
• Lady looks at beloved’s grave
• Happy couple on tropical beach
• Cheerful domestic scene with kids
• Homeless couple huddles under blanket
• Dude thinks about his beloved, who is a nun
• Grumpy middle aged couple fights at therapy

Some of these are perfectly fine, but you gotta admit this is a much lower batting average for love than you’d expect from this strip. My favorite is the nun one, myself. I like how the guy’s dog looks almost as sad as he does. “I know she took a vow of chastity,” thinks the dog, “but she didn’t take a vow of no-dog-stity. It’s not right!”

Judge Parker, 4/7/19

Oh, hey, so I guess Marie isn’t taking Sam up on his offer to make “Marie” disappear and give her a new identity to escape from the mob, but she also is going to quit her job that allows her to live on the gated Spencer-Driver estate and make the money she needs to keep secluded! Excellent decision making all around.

The Phantom, 4/7/19

“You’re missing the big picture! Everything we do his for the history! Look at Hellborne Helene here — this plane combined a hot dame with hot legs with fiery hot death dropped onto German and Japanese cities from above! Eros and thanatos, mingled together in that contradictory stew we call life!”

Dennis the Menace, 4/7/19

Dennis definitely went over to Mr. Wilson’s house and pooped in a box, is what I’m getting from this.

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Dennis the Menace, 4/1/19

There were a bunch of comics today whose “punchlines” involved characters playing April Fools Day pranklets on each other, and it really affirmed my cranky opinions that (a) April Fools Day is dumb and (b) there are few things less funny in a comic strip than characters doing things that are supposed to be funny within the universe of the comic strip. Still, I kind of enjoyed today’s Dennis the Menace, because in the first panel, we can see that Mr. Wilson’s curmudgeonly demeanor around Dennis is no act. He harbors no secret affection for the lad who’s apparently in his house virtually every day. Nobody’s looking at him here; his face is turned away from Martha, so there’s nobody he’s putting on a performance for. He’s genuinely ecstatic that the little boy who’s made a mockery of the peaceful retirement he spent a lifetime saving for is leaving, and when he finds out that’s a lie — a lie all the more cruel because it comes from his wife, the woman who knows more than anyone how much he wants it to be true — he’s utterly crushed. APRIL FOOLS!!!!!! :) :) :)

Funky Winkerbean, 4/1/19

Funky Winkerbean, to its credit, constantly does the bit where one character tells a joke that utterly fails to land and then has to explain or justify it, and that explanation is somehow supposed to be the “punchline” of the comic. This strip doesn’t need April Fools Day as an opportunity demonstrate that the whole process of trying to make other people laugh is a frustrating and ultimately fruitless endeavor.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/1/19

I love how completely gobsmacked Sarah looks in the final panel here. “You mean … there are adults who react to events with normal human emotions, rather than just suffocating everything with a comforting blanket of smug superiority? Unheard of!”