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Baby Blues, 3/31/21

Look, as a guy with a Gen X beard situation myself (though I finally ditched the goatee for the full mountain man during the quar), I get why it’s absolutely perfect for “Good Ol’ Stan,” Darryl’s douchey college pal whose visit Wanda has been dreading all week, to have a prominent and douchey beard when he finally makes his first on-panel appearance. I won’t even quibble with the individual decisions to have his hair be light brown, to have him wearing a mask, and to have Darryl’s underpants tucked under the beard in the aftermath of the epic wedgie he’s received. But taken together? To produce what appears to be a wavy light brown stain near the waistband of Darryl’s tighty-whities? That’s just bad decision making and you can’t convince me otherwise.

Hi and Lois, 3/31/21

Look, all you people who call Hi and Lois “unfit parents” just because they leave their infant unsupervised, both indoors and outdoors, for hours at a time: would an unfit parent bother to carefully place that infant several inches into the shade, which is a great place to leave her for several more hours, since we all know that shade remains in the same place over the course of the day? Check and mate, haters!

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Gil Thorp, 3/29/21

The Gil Thorp winter basketball storyline is over! Donezo! It was boring and I’m not even going to bother recapping it! We’re cruising right ahead into spring, the new season that smells like freshly mowed baseball diamonds and [sniffs air] [record scratch] musty old books????

Yes, it appears our baseball/softball season is starting in the library — and the boringest part of the library, where they don’t even have any books or anything. Not sure what prospect would be funnier: if Debbie’s trailing spouse here got replaced on the library board by Gil or Coach Kaz or some other Milford-adjacent jock who really shakes things up in the stacks in a way that at first ruffles some feathers but ultimately everyone agrees it’s for the best, or if market research has shown that sports fans stopped reading newspaper comic strips years ago and so Gil Thorp is about to take a hard pivot into the thrilling library governance drama the last few remaining newspaper readers crave.

Hi and Lois, 3/29/21

I love how genuinely shocked Lois looks overhearing Hi’s tale. “Oh, no, he’s telling them about … golf? But we agreed! Not until they’re older!”

Family Circus, 3/29/21

Speaking of ruined innocence, I am very much enjoying Mommy’s expression. “Oh, no, am I going to have to deal with this moron’s thoughts about … his own mortality? At this hour? Absolutely not.”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/17/21

“Butch Belluso” is of course, Rene Belluso, who once upon a time was Sarah’s art teacher, hired by the mob queenpin who had taken Sarah under her wing and also employed Rene for a little light art forgery. Since he parted company from his erstwhile employers, he’s engaged in a number of scams, like comics fraud and new age flim-flammery and even a little light COVID grifting, so he’s definitely a guy not into “the law” or whatever, but he’s never exactly struck me as the type who’d kidnap anyone, or go out in a blaze of glory in a shootout with the cops, no matter what literary genre he’s situated in. Then again, this is Sarah’s fantasy, so maybe despite her amnesia her subconscious remembers that he once got to order her around, and now she wants him dead from multiple gunshots to the face.

Hi and Lois, 3/17/21

As a fan of Thirsty sticking to his canonical role as this strip’s alcoholic, I’m not troubled by his declaration that he’s “on the wagon” today: his rumpled appearance and his immediate substitution of another chemical fix for his troubles (the raw uncut sugar in Lucky Charms marshmallows) tells me that this isn’t a serious stab at recovery, but rather just another move in his roller-coaster life of hilarious drunkery.

Mary Worth, 3/17/21

Guys, there are few bigger fans of dogs and the work they do than me, but … this is a lot, right? I’m beginning to think that a dog, or maybe a top-flight content marketing agency hired by all dogs everywhere, wrote this.