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Mary Worth, 6/28/17

One of my big disappointments in Mary Worth over the past few years is that her stints filling in as Ask Wendy have been pretty dull. I’m kind of an aficionado of advice columns, and let me tell you, one of the main keys to having a good one is to start by curating the interesting ones of the presumable flood of banal queries you get. The best letters to advice columnists take you on a journey; for me, one of the best ones ever was in this Dear Prudence column, the one titled “How to respect a vet on Memorial Day” (scroll down, it’s at the end). It starts with “I may have thoughtlessly offended my war veteran neighbor by inviting him to a birthday party on Memorial Day weekend,” takes a sudden left turn into “this hot, hot vet and I are both in unhappy marriages and have an unspoken attraction so I want to honor his service without giving anybody the wrong idea,” and barrels home into “I’m only staying with my husband so that his daughter doesn’t have to graduate high school in a broken home.” I assume that as an advice columnist, your main task is actually separating the “horny for heroes” wheat from the “How do I decide which of two very vaguely described job offers I should accept” chaff, but Mary seems to think she should just answer whichever question shows up in her inbox first.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up as that Mary should learn from this interaction with Derek. Because you know what would make a classic advice columnist letter? Someone starting with something boring like “My wife and I kept fighting about my cigarette habit” and then somehow ending up with “so there I was, making out with a cruise ship entertainer right outside our cabin…”

Family Circus, 6/28/17

This is just some bug Jeffy found an hour ago, making this a pretty low-stakes interaction Ma Keane can use to practice when she for has to have the same conversation with him about Barfy, or Billy.

Pluggers, 6/28/17

Pluggers are fine when their wives see their ancient, poop-encrusted underwear, but when visiting a medical professional still feel a twinge of shame.

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Crock, 6/22/17

I like the black smoke rising in the background of the strip; it implies that Poulet’s defeat has had devastating consequences, but gives you room to fill in the blanks about their exact nature. Has some Algerian village been reduced to a smoldering ruin by insurgents because the inhabitants were too accommodating to the foreign occupiers who, when it came down to it, were unable to protect them? Was the Legion’s fort overrun by rebels and burned to the ground as a hated symbol of French authority? Are Crock and Poulet standing on the quay in Algiers or Oran, awaiting the boat that will evacuate them to the métropole, watching the city burn in an orgy of retaliatory violence as colonial rule collapses into a nightmarish power vacuum? “I wish life had a backspace key!” Poulet quips, referring to 130 years of brutal conquest and exploitation.

Mary Worth, 6/22/17

Haha, whoops, looks like I was wrong and it’s Esme who’s going to be tumbling into the wine-dark sea, never to be seen again. This happened because the ship lurched, so Katie didn’t even have to make a choice or feel morally responsible! Remember, kids, smoking is bad, and so is attempted adultery, and so is violating workplace regulations about sexual relationships with customers. If you do any of those things, you’ll drown, probably!

Family Circus, 6/22/17

Are you asking if Big Daddy Keane has noticed that the forward progression of time has ground to a halt, and that he’s doomed to live an eternity with his children never aging, never growing up and leaving the house, just hanging around and saying the darndest things, forever? Look at his face; I’m pretty sure he’s noticed.

Hagar the Horrible, 6/22/17

Ha ha, it’s funny because Lucky Eddy thought he was going to die in agony, so he pissed himself!

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Pluggers, 6/14/17

Look, guys, I’m super cheap — like, super cheap — but it would never, ever, ever in a million years occur to me to do this. Does anyone do this? Do plugger friends just send the same blank birthday card back and forth year after year, forever? Why stop at birthdays? Why not send one of those cards that has generic art and no message inside for every occasion? You get one the mail and you have to derive the content entirely from the current context of your own life and your friendship with the sender. The more I think about it, this is actually a pretty high-concept practice for pluggers.

Family Circus, 6/14/17

I call bullshit on how happy everyone looks to see fucking Billy, of all people. The only way this makes sense is if he’s walking into an ambush, possibly one planned by Sam the dog.