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Family Circus, 10/27/20

I am extremely tickled that Dolly is standing on a stool in order to deliver this joke. I assume it’s a practical cartooning matter — if she were on the floor, she’d be cropped out by the circular border of the panel — but I’d like to imagine that she laboriously dragged the stool in in from the other room and climbed up on it so she could really get in her mother’s face with her latest nonsense, with Ma Keane refusing to make eye contact with her or acknowledge her in any way all the while.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/27/20

So it turns out the bad thing Sarah did was … that she gave her self a haircut, and not even in a comical or interesting way, and June was able to fix it without too much trouble, and even if she couldn’t, Sarah is like eight years old and does everything by Zoom right now, so who cares if her hair looks a little funny, you know? But that isn’t going to stop us from debriefing about it for days, and it won’t stop Rex — who, remember, is working in a COVID ward and the current strips are taking place in the initial wave of the pandemic so presumably he’s watching multiple people die daily despite his best medical efforts — from treating this as the biggest disappointment he’s encountered in his life to date. Rex says that he would’ve never thought to cut his own hair as a child, and it definitely tracks that he was boring as shit from the minute he was born.

Mark Trail, 10/27/20

Oh, huh, I see that Happy Trail Farms really is where various Mark clones are spawned using forbidden science, exactly as I predicted. Maybe we need to have a Crisis on Infinite Trails, with DoddTrail, ElrodTrail, and AllenTrail vanquished in combat, before RiveraTrail can thrive, to the extent that freelance writing in the clickbait era can be called “thriving.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/27/20

Ha ha, it’s funny because Hootin’ Holler is so impoverished and isolated that it cannot participate in the modern economy, which is built around the mass manufacturing of complex devices out of standardized and interchangeable components!

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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