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Mary Worth, 6/1/16

Guys, I’m not very good at yoga, but I’ve been doing it semi-regularly, at home with videos and in classes, for nearly a decade now, and I can assure you that the amount of yogi smack talk that happens is minimal. Also, I mean, I don’t mean to doubt the yoga prowess of mustachio’d part-time substitute art history instructor Harlan Jones, but I’ve been trying and failing to do crow pose for nearly the whole time I’ve been practicing yoga, and taraksvasana seems, like, a lot harder, so I don’t think he’s gonna master that in one night? Don’t push yourself too hard, friend! Your body is your best teacher: if you feel a sharp pain, stop, pull back, try again later! I actually dearly hope Dawn discovers Harlan’s twisted body in his apartment days from now, after he accidentally breaks his back by taraksvasanaing too vigorously, and the lesson learned is that when you make a new connection you should always abandon all your other friends to hang out with them all the time.

Family Circus, 6/1/16

I’m not really sure what Dolly is getting at here. God is enlightening us … about the nature of electricity? I’m honestly more concerned about her body language, as she seems to just be blathering soothing nonsense to him to lure him somewhere, possibly the top of a tall, metal pole.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/1/16

“And it’d be crazy if I had to kill you, to make sure that you didn’t shoot your big mouth off about this! Oh, these gun fingers? I’m making them for, uh, no reason at all.”

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Gasoline Alley, 5/26/16

Gasoline Alley seems a little too square to engage in metanarrative chicanery, but how else should we interpret today’s strip? After weeks and weeks of a boring, convoluted prison break storyline featuring some of the strip’s most irritating recurring characters, we suddenly switch back to Walt, complaining that the ceremony in which he received the Golden Cane Of Agedness from the mayor, which we never saw in the strip, wasn’t covered properly in the media. Poor Walt! Anyway, I’m very intrigued that whatever municipality he lives in has an expensive object that can literally only be taken from its owner by prying it out of their dead, cold hands.

Mark Trail, 5/26/16

OK, let’s be real: the last few weeks of “Mark ’n’ friends try and fail to escape from the cave” have been super boring. But today at least Chekhov’s rock-climbing gun, which was prominently mounted on the wall of the set in the first act, finally goes off. We also some mid-air derring do, as Mark and Carina almost tumble to their death off a cave waterfall but Mark saves them at the last minute by jamming his rock … climbing … axe … thingy into the cliff wall. And kudos to the strip for taking as much care to acknowledge the biology of Homo sapiens as it does for the other animals it covers; whereas most action movies feature characters grabbing onto things in mid-fall and suffering no ill-effects, Mark has saved himself and Carina at the cost of shattering his rib cage, just as he would in real life.

Family Circus, 5/26/16

Haha, I love PJ’s look of heavy-lidded disdain here. “God damn it, Jeffy, enough with this ‘everyone has a valid perspective’ bullshit. Kill the wolf! Kill it!”

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Crankshaft, 5/14/16

I sort of thought I was joking earlier this week but no, it turns out they really are killing off Rose! They’ve been doing this arts-y jumping back and forth over two weeks or so of strip time, and I suppose it’s possible this funeral scene is going to be a dumb fakeout, but it sure does seem like she’s dead (of cancer, natch). You have to almost admire the perversity of today’s strip, in which the grim punchline is put into the first panel and then the second panel is just a son staring at his hated mother, waiting for her to die.

Hagar the Horrible, 5/14/16

Meanwhile, Hagar the Horrible shows you how to land a really solid “ha ha, it’s funny because he’s old and dying” joke.

Family Circus, 5/14/16

As near as we can tell, most human societies have believed that the soul lives on after death in some form for all of history. What if, ironically, this only became reality once we mastered the art of photography? In the 19th century, processes beyond our ken began tying the ghostly echoes of our loved ones to the visual representations we produced. The more pictures we took, the stronger the undead entities became. And now that we store thousands and thousands of perfect digital images … in the cloud … the consequences will be too terrible to imagine.

Mary Worth, 5/14/16

People may doubt Ian and Toby as a couple, but I think it’s adorable how she always looks for a way to slip her wedding vows into daily conversation!