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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.

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Gil Thorp, 6/2/22

So Gregg wore his dumb mask, the opposing team figured out he was blind and peppered him with bunts, and now he’s real depressed and giving up even the pretense that he’s a teenager. “Look at my hair!” he shouts. “I’m an old man! The only reason I’d go to the park is to yell at the young women about how they should dress more decently in public!”

Mary Worth, 6/2/22

Speaking of dressing indecently, oh my goodness, after a dull few days when Dawn and Jared endlessly rehashed his intense insecurity about the fact that she looked at another boy at the zoo and coming to what seemed like a boring consensus about how it was nothing and nobody should fret about it, Dawn is now going to Da Club behind Jared’s back, because their relationship is in fact extremely unhealthy! The last time we saw Dawn out at what I assume is Santa Royale’s hottest and noisiest goth club, she was there with her art history professor and surprised her dad’s ex while wearing this truly incredible outfit. Tonight’s ensemble, with just a hint of bondage around the décolletage, is somewhat more subtle, but I still appreciate the occasional forays into Dawn Fashion to help me keep up with what the kids are into these days. Anyway, does her friend … have a nose? A whole nose? It looks like she might not, right? And her name is Cathy? Hmmmmmmm?

Funky Winkerbean, 6/2/22

The joke here is that the boy waited till after graduation to ask out the girl so there’s no time for them to really form a relationship before they go away to college, but I think this strip would be funnier if she actually just decided she didn’t like him and instead of politely riding out the next few hours is telling him repeatedly that there will be no date #2.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/2/22

Oh, man, I certainly hope they don’t call Rex until the Sunday strip, because we’re gonna need a lot of panels for his ponderous, exasperated sigh.