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Mary Worth, 3/13/22

I haven’t discussed Mary Worth all week because it has entirely consisted of Cal ham-handedly flirting at Toby and asking her out to lunch and Toby serenely pretending she doesn’t notice, or perhaps actually not noticing, while this lady looks on menacingly. Today is noteworthy mostly because Helen unleashes a deadly wave of cringe by announcing “I’ll say it again for the people in the people in the back”; I assume her point is that this is a young person phrase, and that when it’s used by old people like Helen, it’s extremely embarrassing, just like it’s embarrassing when an old person like Toby flirts with a college student like Cal. Anyway, today’s Sunday Mary Worth Epigraph™ is from former CIA head Michael Hayden, so I certainly hope somebody’s going to get waterboarded by the end of this storyline.

Dennis the Menace, 3/13/22

Mostly I’m posting this for the final panel in the middle row, in which Mr. Wilson looks appropriately jazzed to tell Dennis exactly how his favorite charismatic megafauna went extinct. With that clenched fist you can tell he’s really getting worked up about how many of Dennis’s beloved monsters died in a frenzy of flames, and then the rest starved to death over the ensuing months as dust blocked out the sun and the food chain collapsed. I’m excited for Mr. Wilson to overhear the lad wondering what happened to his other grandparents that we never see some day!

Crock, 3/13/22

Say what you will about the negative effects of climate change, but it at least it will wipe out all the characters in Crock in a huge, cleansing flood! (We realize that this is cold comfort to the 44 million or so people of Algeria and mean no disrespect to them.)

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Family Circus, 3/9/21

In the interests of fairness and integrity, I will always admit it when a day’s Family Circus is one of the good ones, and folks … today is one of those days. My favorite thing here is the way that Billy is resting his arm on the couch; I suppose the intention is that he’s indicating the couch on which he’s offering to sleep, but I’d like to think that he’s actually so stunned by this bowl of candy, just left out there at a grabbing height, where anyone can get at it, that he’s staggered backwards and needs to hold himself up. If he can just maintain his composure until everyone goes to sleep, he can shove all of that candy down his gullet and then spend the night staring at the ceiling in the grips of the most delightful sugar mania.

Daddy Daze, 3/9/21

This Daddy Daze is also pretty good, to be honest. I’m still not convinced one way or the other on whether or not the Daddy Daze baby’s “ba”s represent real linguistic content, but that’s irrelevant to the fact that the Daddy Daze daddy has lost steam halfway through the process of putting on his shirt and is now just standing there with it covering his face, contemplating the fact that all of us are really just 100 pounds or so of rotting meat hanging off of our skeletons.

Dennis the Menace, 3/9/21

The best thing about this Dennis the Menace is that dinner at the Mitchell house tonight is that lumpy brown slurry that’s a comics visual shorthand for “Haw haw, wives/moms sure can’t cook, amiright fellas?” Not sure what Alice has added to it in order to make it palatable to her son this time — tons of sugar, or maybe alcohol?

Shoe, 3/9/21

“Look, I’m dying. I know I’m dying! I just don’t want to hear about it every time I go get the prescription for my boner pills renewed.”

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Dennis the Menace, 2/12/22

This is in reality an extremely egregious example of working backwards from a punchline to a joke, without putting much effort in trying to figure out how to make the backstory work logically, but damn it, now I’m trying to figure out the backstory behind a guy receiving an epiphany from the Lord above at a church and then switching to another church. I’m imagining the heavens opening and a divine voice informing Mr. Wilson that his current denomination, the General Six-Principle Baptists, were heretics, as were the General Association of Baptists, the General Association of General Baptists, and the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, and only the General Conference of the Evangelical Baptist Church carried the true faith.

Mark Trail, 2/12/22

You know, I remember a time when Rusty would be over the moon just to be allowed to go on a trip with Mark and Cherry, and would certainly not plan on killing a cryptid for social media fame without their permission. I guess it’s true that the only way to raise a respectful ward son is to keep him in a “Rusty coop” out back 350 days a year. Parents these days are going soft, and it’s the source of nothing but trouble!

Pluggers, 2/12/22

I think a lot about a story a friend once told me about a Bay Area Vietnamese restaurant that was famous for serving fake but very convincing meat in its dishes. Once my friend was eating there and a guy came in and started berating the owner, who always was out and about serving as host, about how even though they weren’t serving meat they were still promoting meat culture, which is a culture of death. The owner listened to his whole diatribe stone-faced and finally just replied, “Look, we’re Buddhists, we like pork but we can’t eat it.” Anyway, after seeing this panel, I’m going to spend my weekend working on “horseshoe theory, but for pluggers.”

Dick Tracy, 2/12/22

This doesn’t actually have anything to do with the Moran case directly; Dick just knows that the best way to loosen up and get his head “into the zone” as we go into the weekend is to hunt a PR guy for sport.