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Family Circus, 10/27/20

I am extremely tickled that Dolly is standing on a stool in order to deliver this joke. I assume it’s a practical cartooning matter — if she were on the floor, she’d be cropped out by the circular border of the panel — but I’d like to imagine that she laboriously dragged the stool in in from the other room and climbed up on it so she could really get in her mother’s face with her latest nonsense, with Ma Keane refusing to make eye contact with her or acknowledge her in any way all the while.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/27/20

So it turns out the bad thing Sarah did was … that she gave her self a haircut, and not even in a comical or interesting way, and June was able to fix it without too much trouble, and even if she couldn’t, Sarah is like eight years old and does everything by Zoom right now, so who cares if her hair looks a little funny, you know? But that isn’t going to stop us from debriefing about it for days, and it won’t stop Rex — who, remember, is working in a COVID ward and the current strips are taking place in the initial wave of the pandemic so presumably he’s watching multiple people die daily despite his best medical efforts — from treating this as the biggest disappointment he’s encountered in his life to date. Rex says that he would’ve never thought to cut his own hair as a child, and it definitely tracks that he was boring as shit from the minute he was born.

Mark Trail, 10/27/20

Oh, huh, I see that Happy Trail Farms really is where various Mark clones are spawned using forbidden science, exactly as I predicted. Maybe we need to have a Crisis on Infinite Trails, with DoddTrail, ElrodTrail, and AllenTrail vanquished in combat, before RiveraTrail can thrive, to the extent that freelance writing in the clickbait era can be called “thriving.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/27/20

Ha ha, it’s funny because Hootin’ Holler is so impoverished and isolated that it cannot participate in the modern economy, which is built around the mass manufacturing of complex devices out of standardized and interchangeable components!

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Funky Winkerbean, 9/18/20

Wow, if the Funkyverse gang thinks that Bill Clinton has the influence to convince the current U.S. government to think twice about deporting someone, I have some extremely bad news for them. Not only is this not going to work, but Montoni’s is probably going to displace Comet Ping Pong at the center of fevered #pizzagate conspiracy theorizing on various unsettling Facebook groups.

Marvin, 9/18/20

Normally I complain about Marvin doing poop jokes, but today’s Marvin is about how these two fish are stuck in this bowl together and one of them wants to be friends and the other one very much does not. It’s depressing and I hate it! At least the poop jokes don’t make me actively sad!

Family Circus, 9/18/20

What’s your favorite image in today’s Family Circus? I’m a fan of Daddy’s football fantasy, a key part of which is the pile of crockery on the table next to him. He’s enjoying a beer now, but we can tell he’s already had some coffee and at least two meals and he’s still not getting out of that chair. My second favorite is the scene of Daddy keeping his kids entertained by reading what appears to be a menu.

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The Lockhorns, 9/25/20

What with his suburban lifestyle, his commute by rail, and his Jets and Mets fandom, Leroy has always clearly been a creature of Long Island. However, given that the Mets last won a World Series 34 years ago and yet Leroy looks not a day older today than he does in that photo, we must come to the terrifying conclusion that he’s a creature of another kind — namely, one that drains the life force of others in order to gain eternal youth. Perhaps the source of his energy is the hapless Mets themselves, which Leroy doesn’t even realize, which means that he can only continue to walk the earth as long as their on-field failure continues? This seems fully in line with his general cursed air.

Family Circus, 9/25/20

Jeffy, it’s not a question of how old you have to be as much as one of how smart you have to be. So, uh, good luck with that!

Mary Worth, 9/25/20

“Why sales? Have you done it before?”

“Uh…”

[SMASH CUT TO: TOMMY’S THOUGHT BALLOON]

Mary Worth, 10/5-12/04

“…no, not, uh, not really.”