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Six Chix, 8/11/24

Honestly, to me, this didn’t seem like a very desperate measure at all! It seems like she just mentally recited a nursery rhyme and that allowed her to exercise superhuman power over the weather. Who knows, though, maybe she’s exhausted herself from the effort. Maybe she won’t be able to move out of her chair for hours. Maybe she won’t have the powers to deal with some truly catastrophic climactic event down the road and thousands will die because she wanted to read outside for an afternoon! Lots of world-building possibilities here.

Marvin, 8/11/24

“Ah, so you say the constant shit and piss jokes are wearing you down. Well, uh. What if a dog had fleas. What if you told a dog not to take its flea collar off, but it did anyway, and now it has fleas. That’s a joke, right. Like, structurally, you definitely would look at that and say ‘That’s a joke,’ right? Legally speaking, if anyone tries to not pay you because you’re being paid to write jokes, I mean.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/11/24

So Parker decided to not file charges against Randy after learning the latter had been brutally beaten by his own father. I guess we have a long and emotionally fraught but ultimately fascinating journey ahead of us as we explore the limits of forgiveness and restorative justice and learn whether the cycle of violence can ever be truly broken. Oh, wait, what’s that? You’re saying that Randy mysteriously left town and we’ll never have to deal with him again? Huh. Well, that’s a lot tidier, for sure! I guess all our problems are solved, once again!

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Marvin, 8/4/24

We all find ways to justify our worst life decisions to ourselves. Like, just for example, imagine you’ve spent 20 years of your life reading and writing about the comic strip Marvin, despite the fact that you obviously profoundly dislike it. You can try to defend yourself by being smug that you’re now intimately acquainted with the Marvin lore, that you’ve kept track of information like the fact that Marvin has a cousin named Ming Ming who was adopted from China, even if the strip creators themselves seem to have forgotten. But then a few weeks later you get blindsided by the revelation that “Megan,” who I’ve always filed away in my mind as one of the random other babies Marvin goes to pre-school with, is also his cousin? And Ming Ming’s sister? I am reeling, and humbled. Has this always been the case, or did they retcon this just to spite me personally?

Hi and Lois, 8/4/24

Two things I love about Lois’s Paris fantasy is that (a) she’s imagining going during the Olympics and assumes the city will be more or less empty and (b) she has 100% left her entire family behind in America, possibly not even telling them where she was going.

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Mark Trail, 8/3/24

Bill, I know you’re very busy with all the jobs the editor of a modern 21st century publication like Woods and Wildlife has to handle (mostly working on greenwashing sponcon articles extolling the environmental bona fides of the United Arab Emirates’ state-owned oil company), but Mark is not making a pun! He’s playing off the polysemy of a single word, not using a word that sounds like another word! Your editorial staff would be ashamed, if you hadn’t replaced them with the Grammarly browser plug-in.

Curtis, 8/3/24

The Curtis summer storyline is about how Curtis got a job at a local florist shop, which he likes, except the shop is going to close down soon because it’s not doing well financially, and its owners are going to move back to England, where they’re from. It’s been pretty boring so far, and I wasn’t really interested in it, until today, when I learned that the store parrot wants the store to fail, and is blocking innovative new revenue ideas to ensure that happens, and now I am locked in.

Marvin, 8/3/24

Good news, everyone! Marvin characters are starting to be haunted by the spectre of death! I certainly hope this trend soon starts to move in on the strip’s more prominent characters, who I’ve gotten to know and really dislike over the years.