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Family Circus, 6/2/23

Nextdoor, the social network that’s like Facebook except instead of people who you actually like or at least know it’s full of people who happen to live near you, isn’t exactly a hotbed of positivity, but last summer, a nice lady posted a comment along the lines of “I’ve really been noticing the new trend of shorter shorts on men, and I just want to tell the gentlemen in the neighborhood who are partaking: I see you and I appreciate you.” I had just gone in for some shorter new J. Crew stretch chinos myself, and I have to wonder: was she talking about me? I guess I’ll never know, but I’d like think so. But none of us hipsters could hold a candle to Billy’s coach here, who quite clearly was drawn in another decade altogether. What do you think the original caption to this one was? I’m thinking “Can we delay the start of the game, Coach? My dad has to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes and also doesn’t want to hang out with me.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/2/23

Look, non-union Jughead equivalent: I’m not going to say I’m happy that Funky Winkerbean was finally put out to pasture, but I am frankly glad to no longer be thinking about convoluted comic strip timelines, so you can just keep your theories to yourself, buddy.

Marvin, 6/2/23

Wow, grandpa looks smug as hell! Not sure if that means that he is on the History Channel or he isn’t, but either way it’s an unpleasant vibe.

Mary Worth, 6/2/23

Damn you, Lyle Lovett! You’d better not eat that dog!

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/1/23

Many, many years ago, God, so many years ago, what have I done with my life, is this all there is … wait, what was I talking about? Oh, right! Niki first showed up in this strip in the mid-’00s, which in the grand scheme of things really wasn’t very long ago at all, when you think about it, and back then he was a little punk with a weird star-shaped haircut and a troubled home life, and who wasn’t above doing a little light erotic banter with either June or Rex if that’s what it took to climb Glenwood’s socioeconomic ladder. And what would that skinny kid think of the hunky young man before us in today’s strip, who has respectable hair and thinks it’s a little “funny” for a guy to wear graduation robes? Those things are a bit too much like dresses, you know what I’m saying? Why can’t we all just wear sensible black polo shirts, the preferred garment of normal teenagers?

Marvin, 6/1/23

My least favorite aspect Marvin is obviously all the pissing and shitting jokes, but another thing about it I don’t love is that the strip refuses to settle on a specific age for the title character. Is he a baby? Is he a toddler? Can he talk in a way that adults understand? Is he in day care? School? Does he have homework? Can any of these life phases be reconciled with the fact that he still pisses and shits himself on the regular? Because, to be clear, he definitely still pisses and shits himself on the regular and he will never stop.

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Gil Thorp, 5/12/23

Gil Thorp is notorious for bringing back beloved characters from years past, and so when I recognized Gregg Hamm’s name I was excited to see how far back in my archives my search for him was going to take me, but it turns out that all the Gil Thorp plots have blurred together into one big timeless smear in my mind, because Gregg’s story was from the summer of 2022, when he managed to pitch while tragically blind thanks to a little light cheating on the part of his teammates. And while I joked about his “tragic blindness” a lot I never really got the impression that he had anything other than just bad vision, but now here he is with a white cane and everything! I’m pretty sure I saw new writer Henry Barajas say that there’s supposed to be a time jump of a few years between Neal Rubin’s last storyline and his first one, but I’d like to believe that he’s fully lost his sight in the past year, and now is going to transform the 2023 Mudlark team by teaching them how to “feel the catcher’s signals.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/12/23

OK, we’ve been joking a lot about how Yvonne has been a little fixated on hearing Mud play “Muddy Boots” one last time, just for her sake, but clearly she cannot hold a candle to these two Mud Mountain Murphy superfans who have presumably spent the last 24 hours or however long it’s been since Fergus’ previous concert in a state of deep depression and/or rage. Those facial expressions tell me that they’re in the midst of near-orgasmic ecstacy at the return of their hero, and probably were planning a suicide attack of some sort on him if he hadn’t returned to form tonight.

Marvin, 5/12/23

Obviously I’m never happy to see or think about Marvin, the character, but I kind of like knowing that even when I don’t see him, he’s busy making the lives of the other characters in the strip miserable, because honestly I’m not a big fan of those people either.