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Mary Worth, 2/20/24

OK, I’ll officially be back on this storyline’s side again if instead of manfully failing to mention those inconvenient paternity test results and stepping up as a fake dad, Keith instead spirals into a world of paranoia where he questions everything he thought he knew. Kitty did keep Sonia a secret from him all these years, though if she wasn’t really his daughter I guess it was less “keeping her a secret” so much as “not telling him about a person who wasn’t related to him and isn’t any of his business.” Also, she didn’t tell him, a guy she slept with a few times 20 years ago, about a fake vegan with a dumb hat who kept hanging around and who seemed interested in a sexual/predatory way in Kelly or maybe in Sonia, who can say, but the important thing is that she kept Keith in the dark about him! Again, some might call this less “keeping Keith in the dark” and more “not keeping a guy she slept with a few times 20 years ago up to date about her current personal drama, because she hasn’t talked to him in 20 years so why would she tell him about this specifically,” but the important thing is that Keith is becoming increasingly emotionally unmoored, which, I cannot emphasize enough, I support.

Gasoline Alley, 2/20/24

OK, fine, it turns out the shocking and disturbing news in Gasoline Alley isn’t about nightmarish genetic experiments but rather the fact that they’re going to rename Gasoline Alley, presumably because of woke. I guess “Gasoline Alley” is the name of a specific geographical location within the strip, but if it is they haven’t made an overt reference to it in years, and I think it would be very funny if the city council within the strip had the awesome power to change the name of the very universe that contained their entire reality.

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Family Circus, 2/18/24

“Oh, hey, does my toddler have a bunch of friends who I don’t know, who somehow got into the house without me having noticed? Sure, that makes sense. I can sort of visualize what they might look like. I’m definitely giving him extra cookies.”

Gasoline Alley, 2/18/24

So it turns out that the news story that the characters of Gasoline Alley have been reacting to with universal horror and disgust is that they’re going to incorporate cicada protein into bananas. And they’re right to strongly reject this! It’s very gross.

Crock, 2/18/24

Look, not to sound like a crazy libertine degenerate or anything, but I think it’s OK to say that most newspaper comics readers have always been adults, that basically no kids are reading newspaper comics anymore, and that it ought to be OK for them to use the word “cocaine.”

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Shoe, 2/16/24

I was about to start this post with “Sorry I’m the Perfeser facial expression parser now,” but why should I apologize for that? You, my faithful readers, have specifically chosen to point your browser to josh reads dot com, the Comics Curmudgeon, or have perhaps even paid to receive post from that domain via email, so surely you of all people want the facial expressions of a clinically depressed cartoon bird man explicated to you, in a curmudgeonly way. Anyway, today’s strip is about how the Perfesser, in addition to being very depressed, is an alcoholic. You can tell because he looks like he wants to die in the first panel but after downing a tumbler of liquor in the second, he looks like he’s on top of the world. It won’t last!

Gasoline Alley, 2/16/24

We still don’t know what the shocking news in Gasoline Alley is, but we’ve heard characters talking a lot about how shocking and disturbing it is, and now Walt is going on a hunger strike, so I’m assuming it’s something like “LOCAL VET OF WORLD WAR I STILL ALIVE, GOVERNMENT SCIENTISTS AIM TO HARVEST HIS BLOOD TO CREATE IMMORTALITY SERUM”

Marvin, 2/16/24

“Our readers love it when we talk about Marvin pissing. Love it! But like all fetishists, they always need to escalate. What they want to see now is Marvin being pissed on. There’s nothing that the millions of sickos who read Marvin want more than to think about a toddler who’s simply covered in dog piss” –the Marvin creative team, who must be stopped, by the intervention of the U.S. military special forces if necessary