Post Content

Mary Worth, 7/26/24

Oh, man, sorry I thought this was going to be something “normal” like Wilbur deciding to murder his fish for attention, when in fact he’s going to dream/fantasize about merging with his dead fish as some kind of nearsighted human/fish hybrid. A dead one, too! Remember how he was speculating yesterday about fish heaven? Well, in his imagining, this is fish heaven, when a fish transcends its fishy form and becomes merged with Wilbur. Imagine the sick sort of God who would consider such a nightmare to be a reward for a life well lived: this is the deity that Wilbur worships.

Gil Thorp, 7/26/24

Speaking of cruel Gods, imagine if you were invited, just briefly, to bask in the holy radiance of your Creators, except that it has to take the form of walking by a couple of dudes sitting behind a folding table at Comic-Con, where you’ll be surrounded by absolute dorks. Would probably take a lot of the mystery out of the whole thing, right?

Pluggers, 7/26/24

A lot of people use my Pluggers commentary as evidence that I’m a coastal elitist who hates real, down-home Americans from the heartland, but nothing I’ve ever said about pluggers is anywhere close to as contemptuous as “pluggers get trapped in port-a-pottys all the time, probably they fall down in there accidentally and get all covered with really nasty piss and shit, that’s a classic plugger situation and that’s the tea, sis.”

Post Content

Dustin, 7/22/24

To me, this feels very much like a strip that was originally going to do some kind of wordplay on the polysemic nature of “alarmed” — “it was alarmed” … “the door was alarmed?” … “no, [something funnier] was alarmed” — but then gave up on figuring out what [something funnier] might be and just did a “quiet quitting” joke instead with out even going back and reworking the dialogue that led up to it. Frankly, I kind of enjoy the idea that the narrative voice for Dustin (the comic strip) has boundless contempt for Dustin (the character) and yet both do the most half-assed job possible in any situation.

Mary Worth, 7/22/24

Love the way Mary is holding her hands at the ready in the second panel. She’s prepared to clap if these two manage to actually do a good job with this song, but she hasn’t been fully convinced yet.

Suburban Fairy Tales, 7/22/24

Don’t worry, Little Pig #2! Hay fever is the layperson’s term for allergy-induced rhinitis, and it is not contagious. I guess this sort of ignorance of the respiratory system explains why you built a feeble house made of out of sticks despite your primary predator using his powerful lungs as a hunting mechanism.

[HA HA WHOOPS I MISREAD THIS BECAUSE MY BRAIN WAS ALREADY WRITING THIS JOKE AS I WAS PROCESSING THE SENTENCE, SORRY EVERYBODY I AM ASHAMED]

Gil Thorp, 7/22/24

I think we can agree that doctors and cops are, if not jocks, then at least jock-adjacent, which it was why it was groundbreaking when characters from Rex Morgan, M.D. and Dick Tracy did the nerdiest thing possible (go to a comics convention). But now, with this wacky Gil Thorp summer storyline, we’re going to see pure unadulterated jock-nerd convergence. God help us all!

Post Content

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/13/24

Hey, he got made but he didn’t get caught, seeing as he’s standing right here in front of you a free tween. He can still pull this off! Look, his shirt is exactly same color as the couch, you could easily camouflage him as part of the decor when the cops show up!

Mary Worth, 7/13/24

DAWN [thinking]: “Ha ha, when he says they ‘saved’ him, he probably means he once again fell into the water and they had to fish him out, right? He doesn’t mean they saved him emotionally, right? Not gonna ask that out loud. Better just to assume. Don’t really want to know the truth.”

Gil Thorp, 7/13/24

[getting increasingly agitated] Wait, who won it? Who is the winner?? [calming down] Oh, right, it’s a literary device to create suspense, we’ll find out tomorrow, that’s fine, I can wait [suddenly getting agitated again] Oh NO it’s SATURDAY, Gil Thorp doesn’t run on Sundays, I gotta wait till Monday, HOW AM I GONNA WAIT TILL MONDAY