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Mark Trail, 6/7/21

Mark is off battling influencers, and Cherry is about to do battle with an HOA over native plants, so where does that leave Rusty? Well, Rusty is about to have a sleepover pizza party with Oscar winner Robert Shaw! What do you think they’re going to talk about? Jaws or The Sting would be the obvious choice, but you never know: Rusty might want to hear stories about his time in the ’50s doing Shakespeare at the Old Vic. He’s not a baby, after all!

Mary Worth, 6/7/21

Oh, dear, it looks like we’re getting to that time in a great Mary Worth storyline where I just post every strip! Anyway, today Ashlee asks Drew if he’s bummed about killing someone on the operating table but it turns out he’s just sad about his fancy watch, which she stole, and I challenge anyone working in comedy today to come up with something funnier than this. You can’t, it’s the peak of humor and we’ll be talking about this day for years to come. (Drew did kill someone on the operating table, of course, but he stopped feeling anything about that sort of thing years ago.)

Marvin, 6/7/21

Speaking of people feeling things, Marvin’s grandfather’s stunned facial expression in the final panel here is wholly appropriate. “Gee,” he’s thinking, “I thought we were best friends, but I never guessed how bleak and loveless his marriage was! I suppose you truly never can know another person.”

Crankshaft, 6/7/21

Wow, pretty rude of Crankshaft and his girlfriend to be going on and on about how great drive-in theaters are just days after his own grandson’s movie theater closed due to lack of customers. On the other hand, maybe it was a sign of respect that Crankshaft never went and had sex and/or made terrible puns in Max’s place of business.

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Dennis the Menace, 6/6/21

Ha ha, it’s another Sunday strip where Dennis does some menacing without even showing up! He’s interfering with his parents’ marriage — not by doing anything specific, this time, but just by existing. By being so much. What room is there for Henry and Alice? Dennis is all anyone can think about. Dennis is all there is.

Marvin, 6/6/21

Marvin, meanwhile? His parents aren’t even thinking about him at all! Their inability to relate to one another and indeed their increasing mutual animosity is completely unrelated to their terrible baby, and is much more about how terrible they are, separately and together. Anyway, it’s funny because Marvin’s mom thinks Marvin’s dad is dumb, and he’s sensitive about it!

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Dustin, 4/23/21

So the last time I tackled wordplay in a Sunday Dustin comic strip lots of people got mad at me because apparently they think hanger and anger rhyme, so maybe I shouldn’t tempt fate again, but whatever: I can tell by looking at it that this punchline is supposed to be wordplay, but I have no idea what the wordplay is supposed to be. I guess we’re meant to believe “takes it out on approval” is a well-known English phrase we all know and love, maybe? Well, it’s it’s not, but I’m sure a bunch of people are going to chime in telling me it is actually and I’m wrong. Anyway, one of the things about Dustin is that it’s about a generational war between two unlikeable characters, and you have to kind of admire how it makes you dislike whichever one is in the strip on any given day.

Marvin, 4/23/21

Get it? “Cry-Fi”? Because instead of communicating via a local wireless arean network defined by the IEEE 802.11 standards, he’s just yelling? Mercy! That’s pretty funny, of course, but let’s not let it distract us from the main thing here, which is that Marvin’s parents have locked him outside to die of exposure and starvation.