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Family Circus, 5/17/19

God, I honestly love Big Daddy Keane’s whole deal here. He looks beaten down by life, his facial expression numb and his tie just a little loose and disheveled, and mostly what he wants to do is take that spoon he’s holding delicately in his big, meaty mitt and just go to town on that enormous bowl of chocolate pudding. Look at all that pudding! That’s like a soup bowl’s worth of pudding! And it’s his due, as the family breadwinner. Jeffy sticking his grubby face into his peripheral vision is just pissing him off. Let the man eat his pudding in peace, Jeffy.

Six Chix, 5/17/19

I also enjoy today’s Six Chix, because based on the dialogue you’d expect the speaker to be sort of heavy-lidded and languorous, just dully shoving cookie after cookie into her mouth and barely tasting them, but in fact she’s staring at a half-eaten cookie wide-eyed with anxiety, as if she can’t fully articulate what mania is causing her to keep eating them. Her boyfriend is asleep, or maybe dead.

Mark Trail, 5/17/19

“Boy, am I glad we found Skull Mountain!” is the sort of thing a guy says, ironically, right before he gets killed by a bunch of spooky, evil skeletons.

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Funky Winkerbean, 5/13/19

“Yeah, Summer! Remember Summer, my daughter, your stepdaughter, who’s also best friends with your daughter? I get how I threw you by looking at the calendar so you’d think I was talking about summer the season. Also, it’s easy to forget about Summer my daughter because she’s not in the strip much anymore. She only seems to call me late in the semester, probably because she really doesn’t like talking to me, and, honestly, can you blame her?”

Slylock Fox, 5/13/19

Slylock has apparently solved all the Forest Realm’s mysteries, because now he’s putting his patented powers of ratiocination to use on solving puzzles like “who dumped trash on the side of the road?” The mess he and Max are making in the process actually offers a good glimpse into how his legalistic mind operates: for Slylock, once he’s spotted a crime, he must immediately work to find the perpetrator by any means necessary, even if those means actively make the litter problem, and the lives of the citizens whom he’s ostensibly working to protect, demonstrably worse.

Mary Worth, 5/13/19

I honestly really respect that Mary is keeping her eyes on the prize here, and that prize is not Estelle’s tender heart or her future ability to trust others or whatever, but is rather the ten large that she Venmo’d to @artherzero7. Hearts heal on their own, with time, but bank accounts do not, and that’s why we’re gonna get Interpol involved in this damn thing!

Mark Trail, 5/13/19

That is going to leave a mark, Mark: A Mark-shaped mark! Ha ha, get it? Anyway, Mark just shattered his pelvis.

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Dick Tracy, 5/11/19

Oh hey, turns out I got bored with Dick Tracy’ Minit Mystery when it suddenly became be less about municipal politics and more about a leftist radical cop killer for hire (?) who killed a lady cop and that led to the local police apparatus violently cracking down on all local organized crime in civil rights violating ways, but now it turns out that, oops, the real cop killer was the lady cop’s husband! “Oops,” says Dick, “I was so obsessed with gangsters that I forgot that 55 percent of women in the U.S. are killed by intimate partners, which you’d think would be a stat at the top of your mind if you’re a person who solves murders for a living. Anyway, sorry about all the organized crime prosecutions we screwed up, by arresting a bunch of gangsters without warrants for no good reason.”

Gil Thorp, 5/11/19

Oh, hey, turns out that once the softball team got super into having interests outside of school, everyone wanted to get in on the “having outside interests” action, which they dubbed as “being too cool for school,” for some reason. Anyway, today’s the day when this relatively harmless trend pivots to becoming the ideological core of a revolutionary vanguard party!

Mark Trail, 5/11/19

Oh, hey, turns out that buzzing sound in Mark Trail was, as I predicted, bees. Bees, everyone! Ha ha, Mark is running away from a bunch of bees!