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Mary Worth, 3/6/23

I have been a Star Trek dork since I was a wee lad in the early ’80s, and one of great joys of having lived as long as I have is that I have now lived through multiple instances of whoever the Star Trek IP rights holder was at the time saying “Oh, remember Star Trek? The thing you thought we were never going to make any more of? Well, guess what: we’ve decided to make more of it. Enjoy!” Anyway, the current set of shows, which I will watch every episode of because I’m a huge slut for Star Trek, are something of mixed bag, just like every other iteration of the franchise has been, but I have to say that my biggest gripe about them is that they follow the modern-day arc-driven 10-to-12 episode season format, which basically means every episode is almost entirely about the overall season plot. This means that there’s no room for episodes like “Kirk and Spock go undercover on Planet Al Capone” or “Dr. Crusher hooks up with a ghost” or “The DS9 gang challenges some Vulcans to a baseball game,” which were never anybody’s idea of the “best” episodes at the time but which anyone who was watching then looks back on with great fondness.

Anyway, this all has a lot to do with the shifting economics of television (and I’m also pleased to say that Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks manage to do classic standalone episodes to a certain extent), but weirdly I feel like a similar shift has happened to another franchise that I will never stop being a fan of no matter what, which is to say Mary Worth, despite the fact that nothing about the structure of the soap opera comic strip has changed in years. But we’ve gotten so used to the storylines all being about core-cast-adjacent characters (mostly Wilbur and women who for reasons nobody can explain have sex with Wilbur, let’s be honest here) that we forget that a lot of our most beloved plots used to be about one-off grandstanding oddball characters who would come and go, people with sibling inheritance problems and shopping addictions and ill-advised flirtations with erotic art collectors and such. So I personally would be pretty psyched if this current storyline was less “What’s up with Wilbur’s ex’s love life” and more “How can this uncle/nephew veteranarian team overcome unfair Yelp reviews?”

Dennis the Menace, 3/6/23

OK, I’ll admit it: it’s pretty menacing to make a big mess when you have guests over and then immediately say “Clean up my mess? That mess happened in the past, Gina. The past! I’m moving forward, not backwards! Why are you dwelling on this?”

Shoe, 3/6/23

Now that marijuana is legal-ish in most of the U.S., even the core Shoe demographic is ready for jokes about it! That doesn’t mean that they would recognize the names of more than one famous person who enjoys using cannabis recreationally, however.

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Gasoline Alley, 2/28/23

One of the fascinating things about the current state of AI is that in science fiction, we imagined that robots would be able to dryly give ultra-correct answers to concrete questions but struggle with nuance, emotion, and (for some reason) contractions, while what we have today are chatbots like ChatGPT that will respond to your questions in fully idiomatic English paragraphs full of confidently delivered vague bullshitting and outright errors. Similarly, I think it’s funny that this is a strip with a talking bear that seems to be fluent in English but gets hung up on the idea that the bear might not understand some pretty basic idioms, when it should be focusing on laying the worldbuilding groundwork for the coming Human-Bear Wars, in which our ursine foes combine their massive strength with their newfound ability to communicate abstract concepts to one another to become an unstoppable fighting force.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/28/23

Remember, Snuffy only recently awakened his father from a Rip Van Winkle-seque sleep that lasted for who knows how many decades, so this punchline is literally true and very poignant. Pappy Smif is a man ripped out of his time! All his contemporaries are long dead, as is every detail of the world he thought he knew.

Dustin, 2/28/23

Hey, were you worried that Dustin’s parents don’t have much of a social life? Well, they do! It involves hanging out with other old people who also hate and resent their children.

Dennis the Menace, 2/28/23

Wait, is it supposed to be somehow menacing when Dennis reveals that his mother thoughtfully tidied up the house before company came over? What … what are we even doing here, guys.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/26/23

This whole Truck-Wanda thing has been slow-burning in Rex Morgan for months now, but somehow it’s only now occurring to me that this is in fact the strip’s second “courtly older gent finds romance with a gal who owns a diner” plot. One is fine, but two is indicative of the sort of sick fetish that I don’t care to see played out on the funny pages where children can see it.

Dennis the Menace, 2/26/23

We make fun of Dennis losing his edge, but Mrs. Wilson is actively seeking out some menacing. She needs someone who’s willing to say “These cookies suck ass, old woman; you’re losing your touch,” because she needs to know if she is, in fact, losing her touch.

Family Circus, 2/26/23

“Almost as if a large, spherical object is being repeatedly bashed against the wall! Welp, guess we should continue to not investigate this and hope for the best [winks]”