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Mary Worth, 1/9/22

Oh, hey, so, uh, Wilbur died, everybody! Wilbur … died? I mean, maybe he didn’t die, I have a hard time believing they’re killing off Wilbur, but, uh, probably in real life, this would result in his death, right? You might recall that back in 2012 Wilbur already stared death in the face from the deck of a cruise ship, and later declared, correctly, that he shouldn’t be alive, so it’s possible that for the entire last decade every last one of us has been living through his Final Destination scenario, which would explain [gestures around vaguely] a LOT. Anyway, I guess his gradual shift from “Charterstone’s lovable loser” to “the least pleasant person you’ve ever met or even heard of” over the past few years was meant to prepare us for this moment, and while it may be premature to write him off just yet, I’m still starting a GoFundMe to pay Sir Elton John to do an updated version of “Candle In The Wind” for our boy.

Marvin, 1/9/22

In other death and dying news, Jenny has left her awful son out alone in the yard to freeze to death and is planning to flee to the tropics and start a new life, a plan her husband is being remarkably dense about.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/9/22

I guess nobody is going to die in Rex Mogan, M.D., but if Rene successfully sues the Morgans into oblivion for actual intellectual property theft, Rex might have to start living like a common poor person and that’d be worse than death, right?

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Marvin, 1/8/22

I know what you’re thinking: How could Jeff possibly be this theatrically disgusted by his dog’s poop, when we know (we know because it’s literally the topic of like 75% of all Marvin strips) that he has to constantly deal with his son’s noxious poop-filled diapers? Shouldn’t he be inured to these odors at this point? The only possibility explanation is that in fact Bitsy has, through horrible gastronomy or forbidden science, worked to create a turd even more disgusting than the ones output by Marvin. Yes, that’s right, everyone: it’s a poop-off. How will Marvin respond? Extremely unpleasantly, one has to imagine.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/8/22

I guess it’s not a surprise that Snuffy lives in a ramshackle compound surrounded by barbed wire? But I have my doubts about how truly effective this fortification is. If I were leading a band of Barlows attempting to breach the perimeter, I would simply attack at the weakest point, the gossip fence.

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Baby Blues, 12/21/21

Video is an illusion, a series of still images run in sequence so quickly that your brain can’t perceive them as individual pictures and instead smooths them together to create what appears to be movement. In animation, a smear is a trick that can heighten this sense of motion by using an individual frame that itself contains a blur or multiple still images of the moving figure. You can see some great examples here or follow this Twitter feed for more. The technique is also used in comics, sometimes to great effect! But sometimes it implies that a comic strip mom’s face is a nightmarish mass of writhing tentacles just barely contained by a protective mask, and by “protective” in this case, I don’t mean that the mask reduces transmission of the novel coronavirus, but rather that it holds back these awful and presumably slimy face-limbs from bursting out and squeezing the life out of us while we scream in terror.

Mary Worth, 12/21/21

I’m beginning to suspect that the larger point of this Mary Worth storyline is to tap into a near-universal situation: almost all of us have a loved one who is in a relationship with an obviously and objectively terrible person, and it interferes with our own friendship with them. Rather than trying to break them up, Mary implies, we should just accept that people come together for mysterious reasons of their own that we can’t understand. Which is a real cop out, considering that the reason Estelle and Wilbur got back together is because Mary told Estelle to take him back! It’s Mary Worth who’s responsible for your friend’s bad relationship decisions! Here, take this pitchfork and map to Charterstone.

Marvin, 12/21/21

There’s so much about Marvin the comic strip and Marvin the character I find objectionable, but at the top of the list, maybe even above the shitting, is when he gives the audience a smug, knowing look to accentuate some terrible punchline. “Eh?” he seems to asking us today? “Eh? Women be shopping? Sexism? Eh?”