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Mary Worth, 4/10/19

Hmm, it seems that wiring “Arthur Z” a mere $10,000 has made little to no change in Estelle’s material circumstances, but has enabled “Arthur” to trade his filthy, green-tinted hovel for a delightful seaside bungalow where he can enjoy a fine meal and glass of champagne in peace. Thus, this grift is good revolutionary praxis! I assume he refers to her as “my queen” because he sees his scheme as the equivalent of seizing one of Marie Antionette’s chateaus for the common folk to live in.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/10/19

Ah whoops it looks like, despite the fact that Jess’s co-worker was excplicity identified as “Cindy” in dialogue yesterday, my brain refused to process her as “Cindy, Funky’s ex” for some reason. In my defense, Cindy has always been portrayed in this strip both as blonde and as absolutely terrified that she’s going to get too old for her hunky actor boyfriend, so the fact that she’s let herself go grey certainly threw me. Also, I know documentary work Cindy did for Buddyblog got an Emmy nomination, and Jessica did move to LA with big dreams, but honestly, I have no memory at all of the two of them ever connecting professionally. And honestly, I’m pretty OK with my mind slowly turning to goo so long as the encyclopedic memory of Funky Winkerbean plotlines is the first to go.

Dick Tracy, 4/10/19

Dick Tracy well knows that, in his universe, the correct answer is always the most obvious one, so the fact that this sportwriter is from Tacoma, just like the serial killer he’s tracking, is all the proof he needs that the sportswriter is the serial killer, but I enjoy his contemplative look in the third panel, as if he’s seriously considering building a barbed wire fence around Tacoma so he can more efficiently interrogate all 200,000 inhabitants until he gets some answers.

The Lockhorns, 4/10/19

I’m sorry, but Leroy’s whole thing is that he’s a poorly paid white collar drone, and I refuse to believe that he somehow rates an office with a door and a personal assistant to field his calls. Was this joke so good that it was worth undermining the very nature of the Lockhorns reality? It very much was not, in my opinion!

Gil Thorp, 4/10/19

I definitely respect Gil Thorp’s total commitment to its unique, herky-jerky visual narrative style, and if sometimes that means that a moment of actually exciting sports action is described in a narration box while the accompanying panel just shows someone standing on a base bag and clapping, well, so be it.

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Gil Thorp, 4/2/19

The current Gil Thorp plot is so dull that even I, a noted Gil Thorp obsessive, can’t come up with much to say about it, but I do want to point out some weird art business here, specifically regarding soft-spoken Nancy Kaffer, and specifically regarding soft-spoken Nancy Kaffer’s ears. Like, isn’t kind of odd that her entire, fully formed ears are totally visible and protruding through her otherwise unbroken waterfall of straight hair? As our point of view in each panel gets further away from her, we’re still reminded that yes, her ears really do stick right through her hair like that, we weren’t just seeing it at a very specific angle or anything. It reminds me of when the managing editor at my college newspaper worried that his headshot in his column looked off because you couldn’t see one of his ears in it, so he used Photoshop to copy his visible ear, flip it around, and paste it to the other side of his head, which is to say it looks very bad.

Mark Trail, 4/2/19

Welp, it looks like Doc and Mark are off on an adventure to find Doc’s lost gold mine, which, I don’t think I mentioned yet, is out in the Sonoran Desert somewhere in southern Arizona, and that facial expression in panel three is definitely one of a man who’s having some second thoughts! You know, thoughts like, “Wow, I’m an old man and we’re about to go spend hours in unforgiving 100+ degree heat. We should get, like … a bottle of water, I guess? Maybe some hats? Am I gonna die out there? I don’t want to die out there, guys.”

Mary Worth, 4/2/19

Mary has been the master of delicately throwing shade for years, of course. Who could forget the time Tommy was smoking weed in his mother’s apartment and Mary made a casual but completely brutal reference to “whatever Tommy’s smoking” while serving Iris tea? Today she manages to pack even more contempt, mingled with disappointment and disbelief, in an ellipsis: “Money from … you?” Estelle should be more devastated by this than by the fact that she just got grifted out of ten grand.

The Lockhorns, 4/2/19

I really want the background to this little episode here, and I don’t mean “one of the Lockhorns gag writers, while standing in the shower, thought ‘Hah, what if the shower hurt, that’d be a real meteor shower, right? Does it hurt when you have hard water? I don’t know what hard water is, exactly.’” No, I’m talking about what led up to this moment within the universe of the panel. Clearly Leroy started yelling or something to get Loretta to come in. Maybe she heard his shouts of pain and thought he was finally having the heart attack that would free her from her hellish existence! But no, he’s just sticking his head out of the shower, heavy-lidded as ever, and delivering this line. Also, they’re clearly at home, given that Leroy and Loretta never seem to go on vacation, and that the decor here is very much in keeping with what I assume is their post-war Long Island suburban milieu, so it doesn’t really make much sense that he’d suddenly have something to say about the water quality now. Basically it seems like he’s put in a lot of effort into making a baffling point that’s only left everyone irritated, which is kind of the Lockhorn marriage in a nutshell when you think about it.

Marvin, 4/2/19

Even casual readers of Marvin know that the parents of the titular hell-baby don’t particularly like their son very much, for obvious reasons. But you really have to get into the everyday rhythm of the strip to appreciate how much they hate each other as well.

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The Lockhorns, 3/20/19

Oh, I guess it’s “Josh wants more backstory from The Lockhorns” week because I definitely want more backstory on what Leroy is talking about here? Because he doesn’t seem thoughtful or obsessed with analysis enough to actually be drawn to academic philosophy, nor does he seem like a guy who would’ve had a t-shirt-worthy “philosophy” like “PARTY TILL YOU PUKE” or whatever in college. Sure, both those behaviors could mask being dead inside, and maybe the point is that now, as a mature adult, Leroy feels like he doesn’t have to hide it anymore.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/20/19

“Oh, brother. I mean, it’s seems true with I think it, but when this guy says it out loud, it makes it all sound awfully petty, you know?”

Family Circus, 3/20/19

“Because they’re drunk all the time! That’s why you say we never visit Mommy’s family, right?”