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Marvin, 1/26/18

As I’ve noted at least once in this space, there was a Sally Forth storyline in, I think, the mid-to-late ’00s when there was a flashback to Ted and Sally meeting in college and Sally is wearing a Sonic Youth t-shirt. Since I had been reading Sally Forth since I was Hillary’s age, her parents were canonically the same age as my parents, so the idea that Sally in college liked a band that was hip among my own cohort was a shattering blow to everything I held dear about my own age/hipness/relationship with adulthood/etc. But that was years ago, and I’ve long made peace with both the concept of comic-book time and my own ongoing slide into middle age, so I’m not alarmed to learn that the super-square parents of the syndicated comics’ worst baby attended a concert of a band who had a monster hit song 26 years ago, even though liking that band had been a marker of a certain avant-garde sensibility at the time, back when I was in college. Anyway, the sting is mitigated a bit by the fact that the dialogue here was obviously written by a space alien or near-sapient computer program that tried to imagine how a human would describe going to a rock concert, and came up with “screaming” (?) until your “jaw is sore” (??), which is technically correct but also profoundly off.

Mary Worth, 1/26/18

Oh, it looks like five-term Massachusetts Senator John Kerry Ted Miller’s boredom with retirement now has an outlet: turning Mary Worth into the muffin queen! You’d think that the current playing field for baked goods — dominated by massive industrial bakeries at one end and gourmet local boutique pastry shops at the other — represents a market that has pretty much shaken out, but Ted, who used to be a salesman of some indeterminate nature at one point, thinks Mary and her kitchen can produce enough lucrative muffins to make both him and her (but not, pointedly, Dr. Jeff) wealthy. Mary’s already posing for the label in the first panel!

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Gil Thorp, 12/19/17

Welp, it’s getting towards the end of the football season and Milford appears to be not making the playdowns, so finally Gil and Kaz can dedicate themselves full-time to taking down Rick Soto’s weird Uncle Gary, who won’t bow to their coachy bullshit about how great football is. Or, well, I guess they’ll dedicate themselves to it tomorrow, since Kaz’s girlfriend is “on her computer all day” (at her job, at the small business she owns) and she knows how to work one of those devil machines, unlike Gil and Kaz who are just staring dumbly at a Microsoft Word document where Gil has typed “WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THIS GUY?” in Comic Sans.

Mary Worth, 12/19/17

Oh, man, I am very much here for Wilbur’s extremely rapid descent into madness as he goes from a cheerful, confident guy asking his ex out to dinner to an unhinged stalker without even stopping at the /r/incel subreddit to get radicalized first. Anyway, my favorite part today, as Wilbur lurks in Charterstone’s weird Dutch angle landscaping, is how he thinks Zak is too well-groomed to be friends with his beloved’s junkie son. He’s a real catch!

Hi and Lois, 12/19/17

The issue of sexual harassment and assault in professional settings has really come to the fore this year, and I think it’s great the Hi and Lois is going to address it head-on with a week’s worth of strips where Thirsty gets tased at Foofram Industries’ holiday party.

Marvin, 12/19/17

Remember: every forced-whimsical Marvin strip about a dumb elephant Santa thing is a Marvin strip that isn’t about shitting!

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Beetle Bailey, 11/15/17

It’s really pretty hard to figure out what the saddest thing going on here is. Is it that the Army can’t accommodate the needs of its older officers and their touchy digestive/urinary systems? Is it that General Halftrack is so thoroughly dedicated to his job that he’s willing to piss and/or shit himself in public? Is it that he’s decided that wearing five adult diapers simultaneously is a good strategy, even though a little thought on the logistics of this would reveal that you’d pretty quickly need to get somewhere private to remove some of the layers, which negates the whole purpose of the move? Or is it that Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC feels a need to compete with Marvin in the piss play/scat humor space? Whatever you choose, I think we should all give kudos to the artist, who managed to sympathetically depict the true pathos and anxiety on General Halftrack’s face while simultaneously giving him a comically large diaper-padded ass.

Marvin, 11/15/17

Speaking of Marvin, it’s not true that all the strip’s characters are required to stew in their own feces or urine in order to amuse this feature’s dedicated readership. Technically, their contract just says they need to occasionally “soil themselves.”

Funky Winkerbean, 11/15/17

Oh, good news, beloved embittered dead comics book artist Phil Holt has now joined Dead Saint Lisa in Funkyverse purgatory, where you just follow your loved ones around all the time, even if that means you have to watch them fool around in a car. Since Phil’s only loved ones were his precious comics covers, he’ll be following them to wherever they’re gonna get auctioned off to, I guess. Anyway, I’ve always hoped that one of the benefits of moving on to the next plane of existence is that you get a certain perspective on and insight into our mortal world, but it’s tough to watch Phil learn that comic books really are for nerds.

Family Circus, 11/5/17

Ha ha, Jeffy has misunderstood something as criticism and is absolutely furious about it, and is seeking reassurance from an authority figure. He’s gonna go far in life, this one!