Post Content

Mary Worth, 10/21/20

OK, I had to go back to last week to make sure I understood the timeline here so that I can anticipate the exact level of hilarity we’re about to encounter. After Tommy’s failed onion ring proposal, Brandy cut the date short, claiming she “wasn’t feeling well,” which we all assumed was code for “was just proposed to by a guy she wasn’t ready to marry, and also he used an onion ring to do it,” but I guess she really wasn’t feeling well, and now is about to leave the house, after what I assume is only a few minutes, and head down to the drug store. Speaking of drugs, Tommy only seemed to walk a block or so from Brandy’s house before being waylaid by his old drug buddy and offered some delicious drugs. Clearly this means that Brandy, who you’ll recall has a lot of semi-unresolved issues about her own dad’s struggle with addiction and who was assured that Tommy’s problems in that department are thoroughly in his past, is about to stumble upon her boyfriend enjoying a big hit of the ol’ crack cocaine — or, better, looking like he’s about to enjoy a big hit even though he’s actually about to turn it down. I’m very excited about this!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/21/20

I’m sure whatever bad thing Sarah has done is extremely low stakes, but please let me cling, just for a moment, to the idea that Sarah has succeeded where Nancy has repeatedly failed and is throwing an absolute rager of a COVID party in the rec room right now.

Dustin, 10/21/20

I honestly enjoy Dustin’s dad’s wry little smile in the final panel. It’s like he’s thinking, “Huh, I would’ve guessed me and the rest of our family were the things she was most grateful for, but at least we both hate it when other people have fun.”

Marvin, 10/21/20

God, I’m not sure what I would’ve come up with if you had asked me what the grimmest possible thing for a fish to say might be, but “I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a fish” has got to be pretty high on the list.

Post Content

Marvin, 9/27/20

It’s become something of a cliche for me to complain on this here blog about how the widely syndicated newspaper comic strip Marvin is just obsessed with poop, but I have to say that I can’t remember of an instance of them actually just showing a steaming turd in the strip? (Other than the noxious title character, of course! [ba-dum-dum]) That’s why I confess I’m vaguely intrigued that the punchline (“punchline”) panel here depicts snowdrift-thick piles of bird shit on Jeff’s car. Why do you suppose they can get away with that and not actual Marvin poop? My guess it’s because bird crap looks just different enough from our own excrement (since this is a Sunday strip, it’s colored by the original artist and really captures that real-life white-brown tinge) that it’s not quite as taboo, but … I dunno man, I feel like this is testing our boundaries and we need to launch a prim letter-writing campaign about community standards or things could get very, very dark in this strip. (Dark brown, I mean, because we’re going to be seeing lots of drawings of Marvin’s feces.)

Hagar the Horrible, 9/27/20

Hagar has come back from a long voyage robbing and pillaging, and his house seems to have been abandoned — maybe his family has left him, or maybe they’ve been kidnapped and enslaved by a rival raiding Viking band. Or they could just be dead! Hagar doesn’t seem to care much, though. Ha … ha?

Dustin, 9/27/20

I’m choosing to believe that Meg overheard yesterday’s stupid conversations about redundancies, got as mad about it as I did, and is now just rubbing her dad’s nose in it so he never, ever brings up the subject again.

Post Content

Dustin, 9/26/20

You know, for a brief, shining moment, I assumed the joke here was that “tuna” just means “fish” in its language of origin, and I thought to myself that “Hey, the few seconds I spent thinking about Dustin today won’t be wasted, for once, because I’ve learned something,” but nope, it turns out the word tuna ultimately derives from the Greek thynnos, which means, well, tuna. So “tuna fish” may be repetitive in that you’re naming a thing and then the larger category of thing that the thing belongs to, but it’s repetitive in an entirely different way than when you name a team after a city, but do so by translating the city’s name into English. And let’s not even get into how the team was for decades called the California Angels, which was actually a fairly clever way to nod to L.A. while claiming territory all over the state after they moved to Orange County, and only recently changed to Los Angeles Angels and it was a whole big controversy! Anyway, the big news is that I got so mad about this that I wasted a lot more than a few seconds thinking about Dustin today.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/26/20

Man, who could forget the Glenwood Motel, the depressing place where Truck was forced to quarantine in isolation for days because he was suffering from a persistent respiratory illness? Normally you’d say this experience was a terrible theme for a song, but occasionally, an artist stumbles into his perfect historical moment.