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Mark Trail, 6/7/21

Mark is off battling influencers, and Cherry is about to do battle with an HOA over native plants, so where does that leave Rusty? Well, Rusty is about to have a sleepover pizza party with Oscar winner Robert Shaw! What do you think they’re going to talk about? Jaws or The Sting would be the obvious choice, but you never know: Rusty might want to hear stories about his time in the ’50s doing Shakespeare at the Old Vic. He’s not a baby, after all!

Mary Worth, 6/7/21

Oh, dear, it looks like we’re getting to that time in a great Mary Worth storyline where I just post every strip! Anyway, today Ashlee asks Drew if he’s bummed about killing someone on the operating table but it turns out he’s just sad about his fancy watch, which she stole, and I challenge anyone working in comedy today to come up with something funnier than this. You can’t, it’s the peak of humor and we’ll be talking about this day for years to come. (Drew did kill someone on the operating table, of course, but he stopped feeling anything about that sort of thing years ago.)

Marvin, 6/7/21

Speaking of people feeling things, Marvin’s grandfather’s stunned facial expression in the final panel here is wholly appropriate. “Gee,” he’s thinking, “I thought we were best friends, but I never guessed how bleak and loveless his marriage was! I suppose you truly never can know another person.”

Crankshaft, 6/7/21

Wow, pretty rude of Crankshaft and his girlfriend to be going on and on about how great drive-in theaters are just days after his own grandson’s movie theater closed due to lack of customers. On the other hand, maybe it was a sign of respect that Crankshaft never went and had sex and/or made terrible puns in Max’s place of business.

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Mark Trail, 4/17/21

You know, one thing I didn’t really like about the first plot of new-look Mark Trail was that it lacked truly cartoonishly hateable villain — yes, confronting the sins of one’s father has a long literary history, but you sort of knew that this was a complex relationship that would eventually, after a fashion, be healed. But a guy who used to go to high school with Mark, who’s real condescending to him and is now some kind of cricket-based protein powder impresario and social medial influencer? That’s a guy who we’re all hoping goes viral on Bikbok when Mark punches him in the face.

Blondie and Dennis the Menace, 4/7/21

I’ve always assumed that Blondie is going for a whole Dennis vs. Mr. Wilson vibe in its Dagwood and Elmo strips, and I have to say that it simply does not come anywhere close to it. There’s a real sense of animus there that Blondie’s anodyne amiability is simply incapable of capturing.

Pluggers, 4/7/21

I don’t usually praise the art in Pluggers, but I genuinely love the expression on kangaroo-lady’s face here. That is 100% the look of a woman who plans to file for divorce two weeks to the day after she gets her second vaccine dose, and has in fact taken any number of concrete steps to make that process go as quickly as possible.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/6/21

Sarah may have forgotten all her magical art skills due to her amnesia, but at least she still has the vague notion that artists use paint and brushes in their day-to-day work. Despite being a doctor’s daughter, the quotidian details of medicine are apparently unfamiliar to her. Doctors punch people, right? That’s how they get them to stop complaining about their various ailments? By knocking them unconscious with a fist to the jaw?

Mark Trail, 4/6/21

Over in Mark Trail, Mark’s offhand remark to Rusty that “crickets are land shrimp” went viral on Rusty’s TikTok BikBok, and so he’s flown to LA to do a hip-hop video with Reptiliannaire, a reptile-themed rapper. However, because I know a lot of people read Mark Trail for accurate information about flora and fauna, I find today’s strip irresponsible: I can assure you that you are not likely to step out of LAX and encounter an iguana in the backseat of the first car you enter in the “California reality.” (You will instead get into a Lyft that smells like weed.)

Mary Worth, 4/6/21

Hey, remember when Saul first showed up in Charterstone, and he was a rude jerk to everyone, and then then his dog died, and he was emotionally devastated, and also it turned out that many years ago his family forced him to give up his true love in order to marry someone else, and he literally fled in terror when Mary tried to get him to talk about his feelings, so eventually she just forced him to adopt a dog against his will? Well, he’s never been to therapy! What could he possibly gain from it? It’s for girls, mostly.

Blondie, 4/6/21

You ever look at some particularly weird character design choice in a legacy comic and think to yourself, “Enh, that’s just the ossified memory of some decades-old artistic style that sort of made sense in a former aesthetic and is too closely tied to the character to ditch now, it’s probably not worth thinking about.” Well, I regret to inform you that those design choices are very real and literal in the universe of the strip, and they make other characters in the strip horny. They are absolutely a sex thing. Huge apologies for breaking this to you like this, but I don’t believe in letting my readers live in a world of comforting lies.

Pluggers, 4/6/21

“Oh well,” you’re probably thinking after that one, “at least I don’t know much about pluggers’ peeing and pooping situation.” Well, I’ve got bad news on that front too.