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Gil Thorp, 6/15/22

“Look, I’m only asking this because one of my dumb students put me up to it, but: were you guys in the mob or what? It’s ok, you can tell me. I’m not in the mob. I asked to join, but they said no. I didn’t want to do crimes or anything, they just seemed like cool guys to hang out with, from all the movies and everything.”

Mary Worth, 6/15/22

Folks, you know — you know — that I am Mary Worth lifer at this point. Even before the day I first brought the phrase “Wilbur makes an overture” to the world’s attention (the overture, FYI, was to Iris, a romance storyline that began in the year of our lord 2004), I was all in, and remain entirely tangled with this strip on a personal, emotional, and frankly professional level. But the thing is, when they know you need them, they can go to some pretty out-there places, because they know you have no choice to go there with them. Like “Dawn’s boyfriend is going to dump her for a domestic violence victim he met while he was one of her caregivers at the hospital, because they both named their cats after Star Wars characters, also Dawn is out clubbing with random dudes but he doesn’t know and that doesn’t figure into his calculus.” Pretty grim stuff, man! But I’ve got no other options now. I’ve gotta ride this one as far down as it goes.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/15/22

“Oh, and I also did a bunch of extremely illegal things that they’re gonna put me in prison for. That’s gonna put a crimp in my whole crime-fighting career as well, I guess.”

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Gil Thorp, 6/6/22

Look, folks, I’ve never claimed to be particularly “baseball savvy,” so I apologize for failing to follow Saturday’s disjointed jargon about Ryne Duren. (Just as a side note, faithful reader/Twitter follower Windier E. Megatons pointed out that Ryne Duren is a classic guy for the Let’s Remember Some Guys genre of sport talk, which you’d think Gil Thorp would engage in more often.) Apparently the point was not that “You should get better glasses, like Ryne Duren did” but rather that “Now that your opponents know your vision is poor, you should ham it up and make it seem like you have very little control, like Ryne Duren did, so that they’re terrified you’re going to ‘accidentally’ murder them with a fastball to the face, something that a coach at the high school level would definitely just let happen.” Remember, kids, using a series of elaborate coded signals to compensate for your disability is the pusillanimous tactic of an effeminate coward and violates the rules of baseball. But pretending to be a true psycho/major legal liability for your school district? That’s all the game, fellas.

Slylock Fox, 6/6/22

A thing that I have noticed in my many years of Slylock Fox studies is that a great many of the “mysteries” simply involve a sapient animal who has been caught in some wrongdoing offering a transparently false alibi that Slylock easily sees through. Today it occurs to me that one of the things that distinguishes humans from (present-day) animals is our ability to imagine counterfactuals: ways that events could have, but did not, play out, or, alternately, explanations that we know to be false for actual events. Perhaps part of the great Animalpocalypse was the non-humans’ sudden ability to dream up counterfactuals of their own, but being so new to them, they find them difficult to refute. Only Slylock, one of the wisest of the new breed of animals, is able to keep is bearings on reality in this brave new world.

Pardon My Planet, 6/6/22

The comics pages are a small-c conservative institution heavily invested traditional institutions like the nuclear family. Only truly radical strips like Pardon My Planet are willing to speak the unpopular truth: raising children is exactly like your soul being condemned for your sins and tortured forever, in hell.

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Mary Worth, 6/4/22

Whenever Jared appears in this strip, he inspires intense loathing in both me and, based on your comments, all of you, and one of the fascinating things about Mary Worth is that it’s never clear if that’s the intended effect. Like, normal people recognize Jared as a needy, petulant, emotionally manipulative “nice guy,” but are we supposed to view him as such, or is he actually just an unappreciated sad sack worthy of love, and worthy of Dawn’s love in particular? Well, I kind of feel like today’s strip, in which Dawn goes clubbing with strange men like a whore while Jared gently consoles a victim of domestic violence, answers the question, and I’m excited that we’re all going to get the outcome we’ve been begging for (Dawn and Jared breaking up) but only because Dawn isn’t good enough for him.

Gil Thorp, 6/4/22

Wow, huh, so we’ve spent this entire spring focused on Gregg’s little blindness problem and finally we have a solution to it: get better glasses. Glasses, everybody! Why didn’t we think of that? You know, weirdly there hasn’t been a girl’s softball B-plot this year, and I think it may be because the Lady Mudlarks are too smart to be in this strip.