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The Phantom, 10/24/20

Next week: NEW ADVENTURE!!!! Hopefully its climax will be as exciting as this one: The Phantom dozing off while his wife natters on about the romantic destiny of her teen son and their daughter’s friend.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/24/20

Good news! Adeela was about to have her life destroyed by a terrible combination of bureaucratic incompetence and institutional cruelty, but then one of the formerly most powerful people in the world was convinced to make a phone call and it solved all her problems! Everyone who’s more than one degree of separation from a current or former political leader can go fuck themselves, though.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/24/20

I am not a parent, but I know enough parents to sometimes get a glimpse of why the Family Circus has historically been beloved among parents, and I truly admire today’s panel, which features Daddy having been pushed to a place in his life where he’s attempting to earnestly reason with a pre-verbal toddler.

Mary Worth, 10/24/20

[cackling evilly] YES … YES! … IT’S A THREE’S COMPANY-STYLE MISUNDERSTANDING … BUT WITH CRACK AND/OR METH!

Mark Trail, 10/24/20

Mark’s new assignment is sending him to Happy Trail Farms, and based on the last two panels here, my guess is that he escaped from there years ago after being grown there in a vat.

Crock, 10/24/20

Like, a significant portion of the time the jokes in Crock are pretty difficult to parse, and normally I’d complain, but today? When the joke is about how beloved character “Maggot” got horny at the movies? I appreciate this protective layer of obfuscation.

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Marvin, 10/19/20

Oh, I guess yesterday’s strip, which made a zany joke about two fish who hate each other but will be imprisoned together in a bowl for the rest of their lives, was actually introducing two fun new characters in the Marvinverse! They’re going to take out the aggression and rage they feel towards each other and direct at Marvin, which, you know, fair. Just another day of mutual antipathy in the ol’ Miller household, where nobody likes anybody and Marvin poops his pants all the time!

Mary Worth, 10/19/20

It’s of course impossible to actually determine how much in-universe time has passed in Mary Worth in the [gulp] 16 years I’ve been commenting on this strip. Tommy hasn’t aged that much since his drug deal went wrong, so I assume that isn’t supposed to have actually happened more than a decade a go, though he did do at least some time in prison, and Santa Royale has in fact gone through the full arc of gentrification since then. Basically, what I’m trying to figure out if there’s anyone left in the Santa Royale criminal underground who might actually remember Tommy from his bad old days, or if this shadowy figure is actually Tommy’s dark self, trying to lure him back to a life of crime now that true love hasn’t worked out for him.

Mark Trail, 10/19/20

Wait, are we using Woods and Wildlife as a vehicle to make fun of the publishing industry? HEY NEWLY SELF-AWARE MARK TRAIL, STOP STEALING MY BIT

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Hagar the Horrible and Beetle Bailey, 10/12/20

Hope you had a good weekend, everybody! Hagar and his band of grinning Vikings are going to murder these two in their bed. Sarge, meanwhile, is going to murder Beetle with a tank, though it’s not clear if he’s going to disintegrate his body by firing an artillery shell at him at point blank range or just crush him to death under the tank treads.

Mark Trail, 10/12/20

In happier news, it’s new-look Mark Trail day one, y’all! Wow, just last week Mark was getting a big fat raise just for winning some dumb industry award he didn’t even show up to collect, but now he’s off in the woods handling snakes and desperately trying to come up with some viral TikTok content that the kids can relate to. Sad!

Gil Thorp, 10/12/20

Oh hell yeah it’s another Wing-T storyline!!!! You might remember way back in 2007 when one of the shittiest Milford football teams in living memory sort of threw in the towel halfway threw the season and spent a lot of time practicing the Wing-T, an old-timey trickeration play, in total secrecy, to prepare to unleash it at just the right moment. They did, eventually, and it turned out to be boring and confusing, but whatever, this isn’t your father’s Wing-T they’re practicing now, it’s the Delaware Wing-T, which means, uh, there’s no taxes on it or something? More on this story as it develops.

Pluggers, 10/12/20

Gotta say, I’ve been reading Pluggers for more than 15 years and never once in all that time did it occur to me to think about whether the plugger chicken-lady had scaly orange chicken legs under her pants or if she was just basically a humanoid with a chicken head and covered with feathers. But now? Now that I know the answer? I’m going to think about it every God-damned day for the rest of my life.