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Family Circus, 4/7/19

This is maybe one of the darkest Family Circuses I’ve ever seen! Let’s take a look at each of the portrayed fates of the lovers, clockwise from the left:

• Dude in prison
• 25 happily married years
• Dude watches TV with a buzz on while his wife hunches next to him uncomfortably
• Dude brings flower in from garden
• Old couple making out
• Lady looks at beloved’s grave
• Happy couple on tropical beach
• Cheerful domestic scene with kids
• Homeless couple huddles under blanket
• Dude thinks about his beloved, who is a nun
• Grumpy middle aged couple fights at therapy

Some of these are perfectly fine, but you gotta admit this is a much lower batting average for love than you’d expect from this strip. My favorite is the nun one, myself. I like how the guy’s dog looks almost as sad as he does. “I know she took a vow of chastity,” thinks the dog, “but she didn’t take a vow of no-dog-stity. It’s not right!”

Judge Parker, 4/7/19

Oh, hey, so I guess Marie isn’t taking Sam up on his offer to make “Marie” disappear and give her a new identity to escape from the mob, but she also is going to quit her job that allows her to live on the gated Spencer-Driver estate and make the money she needs to keep secluded! Excellent decision making all around.

The Phantom, 4/7/19

“You’re missing the big picture! Everything we do his for the history! Look at Hellborne Helene here — this plane combined a hot dame with hot legs with fiery hot death dropped onto German and Japanese cities from above! Eros and thanatos, mingled together in that contradictory stew we call life!”

Dennis the Menace, 4/7/19

Dennis definitely went over to Mr. Wilson’s house and pooped in a box, is what I’m getting from this.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/24/19

Oh my god, shoutout to Rex Morgan, M.D., for pulling off the first weird plot twist that I didn’t see coming a mile away in years. I’m not sure which possibility is funnier: that crude lout T.J. really is the evil half of a pair of identical twins and Rex is about to have an extremely civilized conversation with his brother on his flight home, or that T.J. was so embarrassed by his own behavior and subsequent run-in with the law that he’s made up a wildly improbable story about being someone else.

Spider-Man, 3/24/19

Whoops, you guys, I misread that article somehow and it’s actually today that’s the last day of Newspaper Spider-Man. Sorry if I made you mourn prematurely! Anyway, this is an amazing final strip, I think we can all agree. Again, there are two almost equally hilarious possibilities. One is that the ousted creative team, out of a sense of professionalism, decided to do a final strip that quickly resets the last 30+ years of continuity so that today’s strip will flow seamlessly into the coming reruns, setting aside for the moment the fact that a minute ago the Parkers were on their way to Australia. The other is that the writer and illustrator have simply come to feel as much contempt for this iteration of Spider-Man as I do, and wanted to ensure that, when the curtain closes on his universe, he’s left in a state of misery and poverty.

Mary Worth, 3/24/19

Oh my goodness, “Arthur Z” is really … beloved TV star Danny DeVito? This is quite the scandal. What will Rhea Perlman think?

Family Circus, 3/24/19

Much as I make fun of the Family Circus for blatantly rerunning cartoons, I do enjoy some of the older ones just to catch a glimpse of the ways everyday life was different 30 or 40 years ago. There are a few nuggets embedded here — that people’s dogs used to just roam freely around upscale suburban neighborhoods, for instance, or that heavy-duty wooden crates were standard moving gear. The biggest tell that this is from another age, of course, is that Dolly is sitting in this kitchen at all. “Where’s Dolly?” Thel wonders as she looks out the window. “Enh, must’ve wandered off again. She probably can’t have gotten very far — not on those stumpy little legs!”

Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/24/19

I know that the inhabitants of agricultural communities are more prone to be “early to bed, early to rise” types than us city folk, but it’s a little weird that Snuffy and Loweezy are all snug in bed and it’s broad daylight outside, right?

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Spider-Man, 3/21/19

I am, genuinely, done making fun here. If Newspaper Spider-Man wants to spend its last few days in the media landscape engaged in utterly pointless bait-and-switches over readership expectations vis-à-vis whether or not Peter is or is not wearing his spider-costume under his shirt, then I say go for it. One of the very first sequences I went through that really taught me what this strip was all about came in 2005, in which Peter’s undergarments were or perhaps were not a problem, with the changes having nothing to do with Peter’s own on-panel efforts. My point is that this feature is going out very much on its own terms. We should all be so lucky.

Family Circus, 3/21/19

One of my least favorite Family Circus things — and lord knows there’s a list — is when some semi-universal cultural touchstone unfolds in real life, like the Olympics or the NCAA basketball tournament, and we’re expected to believe that the Keane kids can’t stop pulling catchphrases from it. It took me a second to notice that Dolly is rubbing her arm here, indicating (I assume) that Billy hit her with the ball, or maybe just punched her and then quickly grabbed a ball so that he could say “I didn’t punch her! Both my hands are clearly occupied in holding this ball!”; before I realized that, I thought maybe he had just farted.

Gil Thorp, 3/21/19

I’m not really a “sports guy” so I sometimes I find myself in the position of wondering what it is that’s confusing me about Gil Thorp: the sport content or the trademark choppy narrative. Like, today, I don’t get why the idea of a scrimmage seems so freighted, and I don’t understand half of what Gil is talking about in panel two. But I do sincerely hope that panel three takes place nine days later, that the scrimmage drama was resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, and that the phone call Mimi is wrapping up here is acknowledging that and we never hear anything else about it.

Dick Tracy, 3/21/19

“It’s your case too, Joe. Go ahead, rifle through the drawers and get your fingerprints all over everything. Take a dump in the middle of the floor! Nobody can stop you!”