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Mary Worth, 7/4/21

Not too much to say about Shauna vs. Ashlee: The Rumble At The Clinic For Drew’s Love except that the art here genuinely delights me. The dynamism of the hair-pulling in the middle row, the striking series of symmetries in the bottom row — it’s all great. I’m very sad that readers who don’t get the throwaway panels are missing out on the extreme Shauna closeup and quote from Yungblud (definitely an artist that I, a cool young person, had heard of and didn’t have to look up on Wikipedia to learn that he and Halsey broke up because they “worked better as friends”). Anyway, the next time this strip spends another six months on “dogs are good, actually,” we’ll have this moment to reflect back on and sustain us.

Hi and Lois, 7/4/21

I’m absolutely dying for an insight into whatever editorial process within King Features and/or Walker Brown Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC led to notorious local drunk Thirsty Thurston pointing to a box full of obviously illegal fireworks and calling them “legal fireworks.” Honestly the only way this would be funnier would be if Thirsty were doing an exaggerated wink at the reader when he said it, or if he blew several fingers off in the final panel.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 7/4/21

I’m not even going to bother with today’s dumb “mystery” and instead want to draw your attention to the Frankenstein-style monster looming in the bathroom doorway. It’s truly tragic that Count Weirdly, one of the last living humans in this animal-dominated world, is so lonely that he’s stitched together a shambolic golem out of the no doubt numerous human corpses available and animated it using forbidden science, just to have a friend.

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Crankshaft, 6/28/21

In the United States, things are increasingly getting back to their pre-pandemic patterns, at least for now, but the scars on our psyches will take years to heal. For instance, today’s Crankshaft features the main character scowling and furious about how wastefully clean everyone in his family kept their anuses during the corona year, and despite a return to free-flowing TP he clearly still hasn’t gotten over it. Honestly, you sort of get the feeling that he thinks nobody should be wasting or even using toilet paper at any time, so this may not be the best example of my overall point.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/28/21

Say what you will about Funky Winkerbean, but it’s a rare boomer-created strip that actually gets a lot right about its many millennial characters: namely, that at this point they’re by and large normal middle aged adults who are increasingly dumpy-looking and disillusioned, just like everybody else ever when they start hitting their 30s. Do real millennials speak in hashtags? No, no they don’t. I said the strip gets “a lot right,” not everything right.

Hi and Lois, 6/28/21

Speaking of millennials, it’s hard to get a handle on exactly how old Hi and Lois are supposed to be, but since their kids range from in age from teen to infant, I’m going to guess they’re in their late 30s and are thus “geriatric millennials.” Anyway, good news for your non-geriatric millennials: Hi and Lois are still horny! For now, at least.

Blondie, 6/28/21

Anyway, on the note of actually young people, Cookie and Alexander are drawn so closely to the Blondie/Dagwood character models that it can be easy to forget that they’re teenagers. What I’m saying is, I’m hoping Cookie is surreptitiously filming this to upload for her huge audience of TikTok followers who turn to her for self-care tips, and she sets it to some bleep-bloop song I don’t recognize and adds some text like “my dad’s in an EMOTIONALLY ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP with his boss … and that’s the tea, sis.”

Marvin, 6/28/21

The Marvin characters exist beyond generational discoruse, so I don’t actually care how old Jeff or Jenny or their parents are or what generational cohort they’re supposed to be in. Mostly I wanted to show you this strip, which I enjoyed because of Jenny’s sly little smile in the last panel. “Yep, that’s my husband!” she’s thinking. “He’s a real lazy piece of shit.”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/20/21

Since Rex Morgan plots move in excruciating slow motion, we’ve all basically been waiting for weeks now for this moment, where best-selling but writers-blocked graphic novelist “Kyle Vidpa” gets Sarah’s epic fan letter (which almost certainly contains extensive drawings and plot suggestions for future Kitty Cop installments) and realizes it’s genius. There are two potential futures here: one is that “Kyle” steals the ideas for the new book his publisher demands, and the other is that he brings in Sarah as a “guest writer” and she achieves riches and universal acclaim. The first route seems unlikely since the story so far has gone out of its way to show that “Kyle” is a nice guy with a sweet wife and doting parents and a good friend in Buck Wise, who is sadly the center of the Rex Morgan, M.D., universe now, while the second starts to get us on the track of “Sarah is a terrifyingly talented and uncanny child-adult” that Terry Beatty amnesia’d his way out of when he took over the strip. Seems like we’ve painted ourselves into a real corner, how will we get out of it? (PREDICTION: It won’t be very interesting.)

Hi and Lois, 6/20/21

Today in “strips that don’t usually make me laugh for the intended reasons but did today” is Hi and Lois. I absolutely love the contrast between how happy Hi looks in the imagined version of this carefully programmed Father’s Day that was clearly designed by a five-person committee and how completely overwhelmed he looks in real life contemplating how exhausting this is going to be.

Panels from The Lockhorns, 6/20/21

Speaking of irony-free praise for comics, the Sunday Lockhorns grab-bag had not one but two bangers today. The first one manages to pull off two gags (Leroy was snoring loudly in church, Leroy is transparently ogling some other woman) without feeling like it’s putting a hat on a hat. The second one is just laser focused on a single, beautiful joke about how Leroy was seriously injured in a car accident.

Six Chix, 6/20/21

Wait, so, is this how matryoshka dolls reproduce? The big doll births a smaller doll inside herself, possibly hollowing herself out in the process, and then that doll, still entirely enclosed by her “mother,” produces a smaller internal doll, and the sequence goes on like that, excruciating birth following excruciating birth? And can we safely assume this is an act of parthenogenesis, with no male doll involved at all? Happy Father’s Day indeed!