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Mary Worth, 3/15/18

Oh, well, this is nice, Wilbur and Dawn are saying a heartfelt goodbye before she leaves on a three-month trip, and … WAIT A MINUTE, COMPUTER: ENHANCE

I guess that’s a coloring mishap that’s rendered Wilbur’s flesh a weird green color, and that that’s his wrist and hand bending around Dawn’s shoulder, but it sure looks like a ghastly tentacle is writhing out of Wilbur’s sleeve and wrapping around his daughter as he finally reveals his true form. He shouldn’t be alive, but he is, because he’s one of the ageless Old Ones whose human fleshsuit is starting to slough off!

Dick Tracy, 3/15/18

Ah, it looks like Ghost Pepper isn’t dead after all, and Dick is a little too confident of his ability to kill his enemies indirectly. Fortunately, there are lots of ways a man (a ghost? a ghost-man?) can die fleeing from trigger-happy cops down a snowy mountainside!

Family Circus, 3/15/18

You know how the Keane Kompound walls are generally vast, featureless voids? Well, Mommy has finally decided to do something about it! Too bad she waited until after the endless undifferentiated emptiness drove her insane.

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Mark Trail, 3/14/18

Wow, these guys went through a lot of trouble to set up a camp in conjunction with the zoo to capture lost, terrified circus animals, and yet they seem pretty mad that one of said circus animals is, uh, lost, terrified, and acting pretty much like you’d expect? Whatever, we all know that this strip has an unaccountable bias against our elephant friends, who it’s described as vicious, murderous yam thieves, so I’m not surprised Mark and company are referring to this poor creature as a “beast” and apparently preparing to take it on in hand- and stick-to-tusk combat.

Dick Tracy, 3/14/18

Hey, so, there was a Dick Tracy plot a couple months ago that I didn’t even cover because it happened so fast where Dick was kidnapped and left to die out in the snow but then almost immediately rescued by … I want to say Gravel Gertie, I think? Anyway, it didn’t really have much of an arc to it, if you follow me, and the same can be said for this plot, which practically sprinted from “Dude incurs Ghost Pepper’s wrath by trying to buy his restaurant” to “Ghost Pepper is dead from massive head trauma” in only a month, which in soap opera strip terms is like one of those extremely brief periods of time that you only need to even think about when discussing the decay of subatomic particles. Maybe the point is to accelerate the crime-adventure-dead criminal cycle, and if we’re not going to see villains eaten alive by rats anymore, at least what we lose in the baroque nature of their deaths we’ll make up for in sheer quantity.

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Mary Worth, 3/5/18

So, uh, Mary’s just not gonna tell Jeff about the time when his friend tried to force himself upon her and she had to slap him to get him to leave, 48 hours ago? I admit to being completely flummoxed by this! Of course, maybe this shouldn’t be a surprise, as Mary simply doesn’t do “dealing with trauma.” Remember when she told a woman embittered by memories of being abandoned at the altar by her fiance that if you just stop remembering painful things, they literally cease to exist? Already as far as Mary is concerned she and Ted just couldn’t make their schedules work together, which is why she’s going to go into the muffin business herself. Those body parts mouldering just beneath the soil in her rose garden? Why, she doesn’t know a thing about those, she’ll tell the cops, and really mean it.

Dick Tracy, 3/5/18

Dick Tracy has a insanely detailed history and deep bench of rogues, so I’m never quite sure when we meet one in the modern-day strip whether this is a brand new villain or someone who appeared in a month-long storyline in 1952 or something. I do want to know if Ghost Pepper has any backstory or longstanding beef with Tracy, because if not he’s gone from 0 to Drag Him To A Horrible Death Down The Side Of A Mountain real fast. He has a “PPPRZ” vanity license plate, though, so he’s clearly a monster capable of anything.