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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/3/18

I haven’t really been checking in with the story of Justin who can’t stop puking up his food and yet is remarkably reluctant to seek medical attention for what’s obviously a fairly serious condition. The most anyone’s been able to get out of him (other than the vomit) is that he doesn’t like getting hit in the knee with a reflex hammer, but today we learn that since he was a little boy his mother has been filling his head with horror stories about his ancestor who died from an operation, and whom neither she nor Justin ever met. We also learn that, in addition to not realizing that surgery is safer now than it was during the Harding Administration, she also doesn’t know that morticians are happy to give your loved one a post-mortem haircut.

Gil Thorp, 4/3/18

“Loses his mind” may be putting it kind of strongly, but I do like the engineer’s fairly extreme reaction to a little mild on-air cussing. Presumably he swept his coffee mug aside while flailing wildly in the immediate aftermath of the incident, and has taken his headphones off so he doesn’t have to listen to further swear words from Marty, or perhaps so he doesn’t have to listen to his gentle sobbing.

Mark Trail, 4/3/18

“The way we’re hunting down this rhino reminds me of the days when Jim and I were on that television show, To Catch A Predator! Only this time the ‘predator’ metaphor doesn’t reflect quite so badly on us!”

Mary Worth, 4/3/18

I don’t know what’s sadder: that Dawn is truly enjoying herself in Florence only now, as massive flooding driven by catastrophic climate change puts even hilly Tuscany underwater, or that Wilbur has to cruelly watch ads for shampoo that feature long, lustrous manes of hair while he’s trying to eat.

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Gil Thorp, 4/2/18

Sorry, Marty: while all-high-school-sports radio is more than willing to overlook a little light racism, they cannot abide the ultimate sin in broadcasting, which is accidentally blurting out swear words on the air. Anyway, today’s strip contains one of the greatest things any Gil Thorp can present to us, which is a panel of Marty Moon looking desperately unhappy as he realizes that he is once again the cause of every major disaster in his own life. This is even better than the time he quietly wept in his car after being golf-grifted by a Ben Franklin lookalike, because you can get a much better look at his face. His crumpled, sad, devastated face.

Judge Parker, 4/2/18

Wow, for a strip that has traditionally moved at about the speed of plate tectonics, Judge Parker has leapt from Randy doing some extremely mild flirting to Randy doing some smug and blatantly post-coital smirking in lightning time! Anyway, the important thing is that unlike certain soap opera hunks we could mention, Randy has nipples, thank you very much.

Blondie, 4/2/18

I’ve been a daily reader of Blondie for decades and … I’m pretty much wholly unaware of Alexander’s sports career? I mean, he sometimes wears a letterman jacket but I just assumed that was an ossified visual signifier letting us know he’s in high school rather than some specific reference to his varsity status. The sad truth is that Blondie spends infinitely more time dwelling on Dagwood’s relationship with various fast-food drive through speakerphones than it does on his relationship with his own son — which means that by prompting this chain of thought, today’s strip is really just reaffirming its own thesis, so, well played, Blondie.

The Lockhorns, 4/2/18

Sorry, Loretta, take it from a guy who singularly failed to cash in when he had the chance: the blog-to-book deal hasn’t really been a thing since, like, the mid-late ’00s.

Beetle Bailey, 4/2/18

Beetle definitely murdered someone with that hammer, right?

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Dick Tracy, 3/27/18

It has been brought to my attention by many of you that Ghost Pepper didn’t dislocate his shoulder in a car crash; he got shot by Dick Tracy from an improbably angle as Tracy lay prone on the ground behind the car. This happened in a Sunday strip that I missed (SHAME), and also the windshield got shot out in the process and the airbag activated, I dunno. The point is that Ghost Pepper’s wound is seeping blood, and, his plan to lay low at the aquarium having been foiled more or less immediately by someone needing to get into the closet where he was hiding, one assumes that he’s about to fall into a tank where something that likes the smell of delicious blood, like a shark or an orca or a kraken or whatever, is going to put him on the Dick Tracy horror death list of honor.

Gil Thorp, 3/27/18

I hereby apologize for implying that the Social Justice Teens don’t know anything about sports and don’t know what they’re doing. In fact, their highly sophisticated campaign of clownish behavior and harassment aims not just to drown out and provide an alternative to Marty Moon’s racist rants but to also draw everyone’s attention away from the patriarchal and hierarchical world of sports altogether. Way back in in the mid ’00s, earnest liberals Steve Luhm and Hadley V. Baxendale tried to bring justice to basketball season by means of incremental reforms. But Steve Luhm ended up a bitter, overeducated high school janitor, and this current generation of radicals are here to smash the system to pieces with pure, goofy anarchy.

The Phantom, 3/27/18

Meanwhile, thousands of feet above the Atlantic Ocean, the most self-righteous nap in human history is about to begin.