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Dick Tracy, 2/12/18

Hey, so, remember last year when the xenophobic Congresswoman Bellowthon tried to pass a law restricting the rights of Lunarians and Lunarian-Americans, but then she got murdered and the legislation never went anywhere? You namby-pamby libs were probably pretty pleased about that, but now that the leader of this alien species is on Earth, smoking fine cigars with a prominent military-industrial complex CEO and casually mentioning that his people are abandoning “Moon Valley” and journeying to our world, planting secret colonies everywhere, you wish Congress had fully funded the Space Wall!

Marvin, 2/12/18

Maybe I spend too much time dwelling on the romance plots in Marvin. I mean, technically, they can be framed as stories about “the sex lives of babies,” but in reality they’re all pretty chaste, and the cartoon convention where infants and animals are given adult-level cognitive capabilities makes everything more or less on the level. Here’s the thing, though: half the time the punchline to these strips are about how Marvin, who has a girlfriend, smells like feces all the time? Because he shits his pants? And enjoys it? And it makes you realize, “Oh, this guy who has a girlfriend, he’s literally in infant. That’s bad!” Anyway, here’s another strip about diaper-wearing babies who poop themselves but also date each other, I guess!

Pluggers, 2/12/18

Pluggers know that a good way to sleep as long as you want in the morning is to unplug your clock so it doesn’t even tell you what time it is. And then when you do wake up, if you have a beard you can paw at it and go “Oh no! How long have I been asleep?” like you’re Rip Van Winkle. It’s a classic bit!

Mary Worth, 2/12/18

WHOA WHOA WHOA TED IS MOVING IN FOR A HUG AND MARY SEEMS PRETTY PLEASED ABOUT IT, THIS IS A SHOCKING DEVELOPMENT AND MAYBE ALL THIS TIME THEY HAVEN’T BEEN TALKING ABOUT “MARKETING” AT ALL???? STAY TUNED FOR FURTHER ROMANCE UPDATES!!!

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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!