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Mary Worth, 5/24/18

OK, so all of us [checks comments] some of us [digs deeper into comments and also into Facebook and Twitter replies] I for one have been enjoying this Wilbur humiliation/unearned redemption arc over the past several … weeks? Months? Time has no meaning, here inside Wilbur’s troubled psyche! But anyway, I’m glad things seem to be wrapping up, because, warmly as I feel towards the Weston clan, we’ve been seeing an awful lot of Wilbur and Dawn lately. Mary Worth has traditionally been about the random one-off nobodies who get their lives meddled and then promptly walk off into the narrative sunset, but if we’re not going to do that next time around, let’s at least get into some of the other Charterstone regulars. Like Toby and Ian! God, I love Toby and Ian, and we haven’t had a good Ian story since that time Toby almost left him, so I’m really looking forward to him being eased back into the strip in a context where he’ll almost certainly say something really cutting and demeaning to Wilbur at a dinner where the ostensible goal is to cheer him up. The “promise” Mary is about to extract from Wilbur is that he wear tear-away clothes so that at the first sign of conflict he and Ian can settle matters in the greco-roman wrestling pit she’s conveniently set up in Charterstone’s rec room.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/24/18

Heather is of course merely a nanny, and isn’t capable of running an aerospace company like Avery International. But if there’s some disaster — well, that’s when you need to turn to a nanny to run your aerospace company, obviously! A good example of a disaster would be if someone were to try to sell the company to a high-tech Indian firm, boosting shareholder value in the process. You’d definitely want to call in a nanny to prevent that sort of thing from happening.

Marvin, 5/24/18

Marvin has spent the week doing an incredibly unfunny series of jokes about Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant, which for some reason they’ve decided to refer to as “Alfafa” … because of the popular Little Rascal, I guess? The Little Rascals, the incredibly current cultural reference that’s always at the top of everyone’s minds? Anyway, that’s just the an unfunny structure providing the base for the unfunny jokes, and you really have to keep reminding yourself as you read that at least they aren’t making unfunny jokes about shitting.

Dennis the Menace, 5/24/18

Dennis definitely has measles, an alarming number of his schoolmates are vulnerable thanks to anti-vaccination hysteria, and this is clearly his most menacing move yet.

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Blondie, 5/8/18

“What’d you expect? A Tale of Two Cities? Did you think an important incident in my life was full of such pathos that it would rival one of the monumental works of English literature? That I experienced an episode of such intensity — marked by romance, revolutionary social change, shocking turns of fortune, and a final, noble sacrifice — that I would want to memorialize it forever in my own flesh? The truth is, as it happens, much more mundane, but I will always treasure how elevated my life seems in your imagination, Dagwood.”

Marvin, 5/8/18

I know I hate on Marvin a lot on this blog, but I have to give today’s strip credit for delivering a multilayered joke. Sure, on the surface, it just seems like a limp “Ha ha, remember disco, and Saturday Night Fever, a famous movie about disco?” gag. But it actually goes to the heart of these characters’ relationship — specifically, it shows us that Jeff will go to really elaborate and theatrical lengths to let his wife know that he thinks her hobbies are stupid.

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Dennis the Menace, 5/2/18

Ha, yes, Dennis, we do exist in a world of corruption and decay, where we ingest not only the cooked and dismembered corpses of our fellow beings but also the dead microorganisms that once hitched a ride on, and in, their bodies, a slurry of organic matter from a thousand different ecological niches, most of it invisible to us. This is what being an animal is, of course: you eat other things that used to be alive. Like most of Dennis’s menacing, today’s incident is just ripping the polite mask off of our brutal, grotesque, and complex reality.

Pluggers, 5/2/18

One thing that I will always say when I try to explain why Pluggers annoys me (and I seem to annoy other people when I say it, but so it goes) is that it’s smug. Not always, but often! The not-so-subtle implication is that these salt-of-the-earth folks are better than you, you big-city elitist, somehow simultaneously simpler but also smarter. Today’s a great example: A plugger just sleeps on an ordinary pillow filled with feathers and not … some presumably much more suspect alternative to this? Yes, if you’re like me, you had to Google “My Pillow” to discover that it’s a poly-foam pillow heavily advertised on late-night infomercials, marketed by a company that was forced by numerous lawsuits to stop making various specious claims about its health benefits. Anyway, who’s morally superior? Pluggers, who are extremely smug about not having been taken in by the “My Pillow” scam that they’ve seen advertised endlessly? Or me, who’s never heard of it in the first place because I don’t watch infomercials but instead spend my aimless late nights reading articles about subway systems and 18th century wars on Wikipedia???? CHECKMATE PLUGGERS!!!!!!

Marvin, 5/2/18

So Marvin is sucking the life force out of his grandfather so he can remain forever an infant, un-potty-trained for all eternity? Sounds about right!