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Mary Worth, 2/15/09

Oh ho ho, Mr. “Confey,” is it? I certainly hope that this isn’t the sort of situation where Confey dents Adrian’s pride or bank account, eh? What sort of man would he be then? Though his choice to grow that little mustache might seem odd to our modern eyes, it will come in handy as he twirls it when he reveals his plotting in thought-balloon form, over a period of six to eight weeks.

Family Circus, 2/15/09

This is certainly one of the more terrifying things that I’ve seen today. Emaciated Ma Keane has finally decided indulge her most sensual fantasy — taking a single bite of chocolate — when a feral band of children led by her own offspring burst through the door. This ravenous mob’s preternatural ability to detect candy has whipped them into a frenzy, which will lead them to greedily consume the entire box of chocolates, and, when they’ve finished with that, the flesh of the poor woman holding it.

Blondie, 2/15/09

“You’re in the final stages of rabies too! C’mon, let’s see how many people we can bite before they shoot us.”

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Marvin, 2/13/09

Ha ha ha, Marvin, doesn’t want his grandmother to “touch” his “buttons,” if you know what I mean!

No, but seriously, Marvin is quite right to be terrified, since his grandmother is obviously some kind of sinister witch. Based on what happened to his mother, he fears that she’ll de-age him to a similar extent, trasforming him into a blastocyst. And because he’s Marvin, it would be the worst blastocyst in the entire world.

Mary Worth, 2/13/09

“Look, Mary, if there’s one thing I’ve tried to instill in my children, it’s a crippling sense of shame at doing anything that anyone might find even remotely out of the ordinary! I’m sure she’s totally dying inside just thinking about anyone finding out about this whole Internet dating thing, so you’re going to want to wait to bust it out when it will have a maximum impact — at her wedding, say.”

Hi and Lois, 2/13/09

Unlike adults, who totally like spending their idle time with their friends with other people hovering over them. Especially when those other people are their parents! That’s why Hi and Lois spend so much of their social time with their own parents. Oh, wait, no, they put them in that substandard nursing home, in another state.

Family Circus, 2/13/09

Dolly is supplementing her allowance by working as a guerilla marketing agent for the Hallmark Corporation.

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Mary Worth, 2/11/09

The last time Mary Worth decided to build a story around this new-fangled “Internet,” was last summer, when Tobey Cameron foolishly decided to engage in e-commerce rather than patronizing one of her local shabby strip malls. Obviously she immediately fell prey to a terrible phishing scam, which gave her nightmares about Ian leaving her because of her foolishness. (In the end, the punishment was much worse: he decided to stay.) The takeaway, obviously, is that the Internet is nothing more than a four-lane highway for deceit that good, honest people should stay away from at all costs, which means that Adrian’s new guy will be one or more of the following:

• Married
• An con artist
• A World of Warcraft addict/shut-in
• A furry
• Wanted war criminal Ratko Mladic, wearing a “very clever disguise”

Not that there’s anything wrong with at least two of those things! But let me say this: my wife and I met on an Internet dating site, and, perhaps more relevant to this strip’s demographics, so did my father-in-law and his fianceé, and if this plotline ends with Mary narrowly preventing Adrian from being made into a lampshade by her maniacal online paramour, leading many lonely Mary Worth devotees to hurl their devil-computers into the street in terror, then I will be very upset! If, on the other hand, the Internet is shown to be a fun and exciting way to meet new people, I will be pleased, even if the result is a surge of new users on Match.com with screen names like DrJeffLover.

Family Circus, 2/11/09

Possible sets of individuals that Billy might be encompassing with the pronoun “we”:

• Billy and Mommy
• Billy and Jeffy
• The entire family, together, in some kind of horrifying pollen-mingling process that takes place in the Keane Kompound’s secret underground breeding chamber

It’s a sad day when the alien plant-monster hypothesis is the least disturbing.

Judge Parker, 2/11/09

“Also, seeing as the only people who ever dressed like this were FBI agents, circa 1964, I need you to tell J. Edgar Hoover that I’ll be out of the office for a few days.”