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So today a lot of comics artists have inserted some symbols into their strips to pay tribute to essential workers during the coronavirus pandemic. And, naturally, there was a range of approaches to this!

Dustin, 6/7/20

You could, for instance, take the Dustin route, where the symbols are explicitly explained in text, and then used in the comic itself to further the cause of recognizing various heroes, sung and unsung!

Baby Blues, 6/7/20

Or you could take the Baby Blues technique, which is to integrate the symbols naturalistically into the comic itself, on the assumption that readers will pick up news stories about this campaign and understand what they’re looking at.

Six Chix, 6/7/20

Or — hear me out — you could do it the Six Chix way, by which I of course mean the most half-assed way imaginable, wedging symbols into a joke that’s already terrible by itself so as to make them fully incomprehensible. What’s the most insultingly placed of the icons here? Lotta people are gonna say the steering wheel at the bottom left corner, held by disembodied human hands, but don’t sleep on the picture (?) of the microscope that the pigeon is wearing (?) on its chest.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/7/20

Funky Winkerbean, of course, can not accomodate any misery that is not Funky Winkerbean, so it will not be acknowledging the coronavirus pandemic nor any of the essential workers ameliorating it, but I did enjoy today’s strip, in which Cayla desperately begs Mason not to try to get inside the mind of a madman, it’s too late for her, but he can still save himself, there’s still time, there’s still time.

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Dustin, 5/17/20

Hello, fellow young people! Remember ringtones? Remember assigning specific ringtones to your friends? Remember talking on the phone? Remember when friends who were your age had both landlines and cell phones? TRICK QUESTIONS! You don’t need to “remember” any of these things, because they’re a part of your everyday life, here in the year 2020! After all, Dustin is a strip whose whole point is that it has its finger on the pulse of how young people behave, and it wouldn’t mislead us, would it?

Marvin, 5/17/20

A lot of people probably have a certain amount of contempt for the army of overeager intellectual property and trademark lawyers employed by Disney, but hear me out: if they keep the Marvin creative team in a state of panic that they’ll be sued if they even think the phrase “baby Yoda,” can they really be all that bad?

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Dustin, 5/16/20

Ugh, I spent way too much time trying to figure out what the context for this even is. Like, she met him at the Dollar Store, where she was disgusted by his economic prospects, and then she … agreed to go on a date with him? Invited him to this party, or perhaps accepted an invite to the same? Happened to run into him at a party and took the opportunity to talk smack about him within what is clearly earshot? Damn it I need the backstory here

Mary Worth, 5/16/20

We must truly be at the final, blessed end of the Dawn-Jared story, because we’re being shown the pinnacle of romantic love in the Worthiverse: Dr. Jeff and Mary, a happy, devoted couple, if you forget all the times that Mary rejected his marriage proposals, or the time Mary put the moves on a local city councilman at his own mother’s funeral, or the time she almost up and moved to New York to live with her handsome Broadway crush, or the time she conveniently forgot Jeff was allergic to cats. Truly, Dawn and Jared have such bliss to aspire to!