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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/17/18

Aww, isn’t that sweet? Jughaid is honoring his Uncle Snuffy on Fathers Day, even grouping him in with the “paws,” and saying nothing of his own biological father. What terrible circumstance has led him to being raised by his second-order kin rather than his parents? Did his father die in an ongoing feud with another clan — perhaps die shamefully, so his name is never spoken? Or was the boy himself captured as an infant in a raid for chickens and other movable goods in a neighboring holler, with “uncle” just a convenient term for non-parent guardian applied to the family that took him in? This is surely one of the more intriguing instances of nephewism in the daily comics.

Marvin, 6/17/18

This right here is probably Marvin: Origins. I’m not talking about the origin of Marvin the character; that happened when Jeff and Jenny managed to briefly overcome their mutual resentment and irritation and have sex with one another. No, I’m talking about the origin of the strip itself, which probably came about when someone was waiting in line for the bathroom and thought “Wouldn’t it be great if I could just shit my pants? And if that was somebody else’s problem? Ugh, God, babies have it so easy!”

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Blondie, 6/2/18

Ha ha, women, am I right? Always forcing you to help maintain your household instead of interacting with your friends because they’re petty tyrants who don’t love you, am I right???

Hi and Lois, 6/2/18

You could interact with your friends but if you do your wife won’t feed you and there’s no way you or your friends could feed yourselves because you’re men!!!!! Women, right fellas??????

Marvin, 6/2/18

Ha ha, women!!!! Forcing you to do your chores but then also working their way through their own chores like a dead-eyed zombie!!! It’s like, make your your mind, lady!!! Adult life truly is a hell!!!!!!!!

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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.