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Mary Worth, 6/14/23

Look, I know I have to tread delicately here, because organized dog fighting is very real and very awful. But since this is Mary Worth and we know that any threatened horrific violence is never going to actually happen, I feel like we can enjoy ourselves and admit to ourselves that Mary making direct eye contact with the reader, with an expression that’s worried (but also maybe a little excited?) and announcing “it’s a highly secretive blood sport that can occur anywhere!” is very funny.

Gil Thorp, 6/14/23

Ah, the vapecrime plot has been resolved by, uh, sending all the vape teens to juvenile prison? I’m sure they’ll be fine and come out of the experience better people. Meanwhile, in more important news, the girls’ team has made the playdowns and [squints at last panel] THE PLAYOFFS WHAT THE HELL ALL THESE WOKE CHANGES TO THIS STRIP HAVE GONE TOO FAR THIS TIME

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Pearls Before Swine, 6/10/23

I’m taking a slight break from my usual routine here to relay a personal anecdote. On Saturday, I went to a showing of The Philadelphia Story at one of the big historic movie palaces in downtown LA, and one of my personal crosses to bear is my inability to be chill about the fact that grown-ass adults cannot stay off their fucking phones even at special events like this. The guy sitting in front of me had one of those absolutely enormous phones that bordered on tablet size, and all through the pre-show stuff where the lights were down and they had a film historian giving a presentation about the movie, this guy had his phone on and sitting in his lap and the browser was open to the Pearls Before Swine strip you see above. Mostly he was paying attention to the presentation but every once in a while he would look down at the strip and zoom in on the phone so he could read it better. This went on for like 10 minutes; he did not look at any other strips, just this specific one. He turned the phone off before the actual movie started, but if I had had to tell some dude to NOT LOOK AT A NEWSPAPER COMIC DURING A MOVIE, surely I would have become the Comics Curmudgeon in that role’s final form. Anyway, if the person who was doing this is reading these words right now, sorry to drag you in public like this, but: when the lights go down, the phone should go off.

Beetle Bailey, 6/12/23

“I’m also burdened by feelings I can’t quite articulate about how my hair-trigger rage is damaging my relationships with other people and my own conception of myself as a basically good person.”

Gil Thorp, 6/12/23

The kids who got busted by Marty Moon for selling vape sticks were all boys, so I’m not sure why Gil feels like he has to alert the girls’ team’s coaches about it in the middle of a game. I guess he figures if his afternoon just got ruined, so should everyone else’s.

Slylock Fox, 6/12/23

Today’s Slylock Fox is a good example of why using a rigorous program of logic to suss out the truth is simply not enough for any law enforcement operation. Sure, Slylock can smugly point out that only a mammal would need hair care products, but the criminal reptile’s refusal to surrender in the face of this “gotcha” means that Sly is resorting to the hotel’s front desk workers to actually apply the force necessary to catch the thief, which implies that he’s failed to grasp the true nature of the problem he faces.

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Dustin, 6/9/23

Under The Skin is a truly great and unsettlingly weird movie that is, probably, about an alien who’s been sent to Earth to capture and harvest human beings for food. I say “probably” because that’s what the book it’s based on is about, but the movie is quite different in a number of particulars and what’s happening in it is never spelled out for you. Scarlett Johansson is the main character, and is definitely not human, and as she wanders around Glasgow, seductively luring men back to a house where they get submerged into some kind of liquid void, you see everything more or less from her perspective, which makes human society seem alien as she tries to understand and navigate it. I’m not going to give away the rest of it, as you should watch it and it’s free to stream on Kanopy, a service you can access with your public library card, but yes, Johansson does get naked in it, and in the context of the movie it is ultimately profoundly unerotic. Anyway, I love it a lot, obviously, and it has kind of a cult following but very few people actually saw it, which makes it a bizarre thing to build a comic strip punchline around, so I assume that today’s Dustin has Dustin’s dad, possibly my least favorite character in all of present-day syndicated newspaper comics, say all this as an attack on me personally. (I’m joking, of course: I actually assume this strip is a result of someone discovering that there was only a single movie in Scarlett Johansson’s filmography in which she appears nude, which resulted in an anticipated masturbatory session that went terribly wrong.)

Gil Thorp, 6/9/23

You have to respect Marty Moon: he could’ve just texted Gil those pics he took of the Mudlarks doing vape crime (the dorkiest kind of crime there is), but he went to the trouble of getting them printed out so he could flash them in Gil’s face in person before throwing them down on his desk. This is just proof that you don’t spend a lifetime covering high school sports without learning a little something about drama.