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Daddy Daze, 2/19/20

Daddy Daze Daddy’s long-term plan to teach his baby to destroy … to wreak havoc … to kill … is coming along nicely!

Mother Goose and Grimm, 2/19/20

Here’s today’s Mother Goose and Grimm! It’s about a dog who just pisses all over a seat in a movie theater.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/19/20

I love how Tildy is staring knowingly over her soda can at Rex in panel two. She may be a little dotty, but she definitely can feel the gears of narrative convenience churning to push her towards an ending of happy heteronormative monogamy, and she does not care for it.

The Lockhorns, 2/19/20

Sure, it’s because Leroy and Loretta, like many cartoon characters, only have four digits on each hand, but I cannot imagine anything more on-brand than the Lockhorns wearing their wedding rings on their middle fingers.

Mark Trail, 2/19/20

“Quick, we’ve got to get out of here, before he finds us!”

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Mary Worth, 2/18/20

Oh no, it’s Jared! You might recall that back when Dawn was working a summer job at the hospital and falling hard for a doctor who was, unbeknownst to her, married, there was a rival for her affections: Jared, a dorky medical assistant who also transparently lusted after Dawn, offering to just come over to her apartment whenever, if she wanted him to. He was extremely clumsy and lived a sad life alone with his cat and his Star Wars action figures, but he seemed to be set up to be Dr. Ned’s “nice guy” foil, especially after he was the one who warned Dawn about Dr. Ned’s marital status. But at the end of the summer, Dawn ended up with neither of them, which, in its own small way, was a triumph for feminism, and it I find it all the sadder that Jared is apparently destined to win Dawn away not from some shitty two-timing doctor but rather from a perfectly nice age-appropriate Frenchman who has the misfortune of not being physically present.

Mark Trail, 2/18/20

Sure, becoming a social media “influencer” seems like it would be fun and easy, but if you go down that road, you will inevitably end up dead under a pile of snow, while some square-jawed, raven-haired technophobe tries to explain what “Instagram” is to a baffled Nepali police officer. Stop now before it’s too late! Turn off your phone and read a book or something!

Crankshaft, 2/18/20

I for one expected this story to be “everyone gets snowed in at the Valentie and Hannah ends up giving birth there.” And I appreciate it when the comics can surprise me with plot twists! But I don’t think any of us had any real interest in the story actually being “Crankshaft finally runs out of excuses and has to have sex with his girlfriend” instead.

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Dennis the Menace, 2/12/20

Just to show you what it’s like to be me, a guy with a head full of random trivia, I read “homeowner’s rates” and thought Alice was using the British term for property taxes, which made me wonder if the Mitchells had relocated to the UK so that Dennis could take on his actually much more menacing rival. But a little Googling shows that sometimes people say “homeowner’s rates” when they mean “what I pay for homeowner’s insurance,” which sounds very strange to my ear but feel free to sound off in the comments if this is part of your everyday speech and you think that I, personally, am an idiot. The important thing here is that Dennis would not have any possible impact on the Mitchells’ property taxes, but could very well be the source of their skyrocketing insurance premiums, because he breaks so much stuff.

Dick Tracy, 2/12/20

Good news, everyone! Mysta escaped from Mr. Robot’s clutches and defeated him using her Lunarian powers, so now we’ve got a new story, about the origins of a bad guy called “Shakey,” because he shakes. Few things in recent comics history have made me laugh more than today’s Dick Tracy, in which the narration box says little Shakey “quickly learned the Golden Rule” and depicts him beating the shit out of other kids and stealing their money. There’s not even an attempt to make some kind of pun or wordplay on “Golden Rule!” “Here’s your Golden Rule, kids: just absolutely terrorizing people with violence is a great way to make a lot of cash.”

Mark Trail, 2/12/20

Ah, yes, it’s an all-too-common story: a sad, isolated person — say, an newly disabled man who isn’t sure who he is anymore — gets big on Twitter and gets a chance to reinvent himself — say, as a guy whose leg was eaten by a yeti. How often do we have to hear this tale before we learn its lessons? Anyway, Minga and Pemba are watching all this from afar, probably wondering if anybody is going to be able to pay them, now that the guy who hired them is dead.