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Marvin and Hi and Lois, 8/24/24

Jeff … Hi … you morons. You idiots. You absolute fools. You’re already looking ahead to the passage of time, to the day when your kids have grown up and this phase of their life and yours is over forever, either with an anticipatory sense of nostalgia (Hi) or a frankly dickish mercenary sullenness (Jeff). But it will never happen. You’re stuck there, with these kids at the age they are, forever. It’s already been decades, but you can’t see it, can’t feel it, can’t know it. But it has been, and it will be. This is it. This is now. This is always now.

Mary Worth, 8/24/24

I guess Ed is cradling his new finacée firmly but gently in his arms to reestablish intimacy after their little dispute, but it really just looks like he’s physically restraining her from rushing to the table and adding yet another color-coded folder to her collection, this one for information on local DJs sorted by price and Yelp rating.

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Six Chix, 8/13/24

“Hey,” you’re probably wondering, “What’s going on with the Tuesday Chik in Six Chix, who last we saw was in a romantic and sexual relationship with a giant sandwich?” Well, bad news: the sandwich has gone back to its “own kind” and is now fucking avocado toast. A sad tale of modern relationships! Should food only date other kinds of food? Well, humans are a kind of food, in certain circumstances, if you think about it. That may sound like stoned dorm room talk, but it’s a real thing I would say, if the sandwich I was in love with was going to leave me and I was desperate to win it back any way I could.

Beetle Bailey, 8/13/24

There’s something really striking about Sarge’s facial expression here, half-earnest, half-vacant. Everything just kind of happens to him, and he’s a little overwhelmed by it. He’s being sent to Hawaii, for work? He has a dog who wears clothes? Neat! But also, what’s next? If he sits very still, maybe it won’t be bad.

Marvin, 8/13/24

Look, I say this as a man who, as 20 years of evidence on this blog amply demonstrates, allows the comic strip Marvin to live rent-free in his head: the comic strip Marvin is, on the scale of entertainment properties, nothing, insignificant, an insect. It definitely is not anything that The Walt Disney Company, in its majesty, would deign to notice, so you could have just gone ahead and said “Disneyland” instead of “Dippyland” here, which certainly would have made this joke work a lot better.

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Six Chix, 8/11/24

Honestly, to me, this didn’t seem like a very desperate measure at all! It seems like she just mentally recited a nursery rhyme and that allowed her to exercise superhuman power over the weather. Who knows, though, maybe she’s exhausted herself from the effort. Maybe she won’t be able to move out of her chair for hours. Maybe she won’t have the powers to deal with some truly catastrophic climactic event down the road and thousands will die because she wanted to read outside for an afternoon! Lots of world-building possibilities here.

Marvin, 8/11/24

“Ah, so you say the constant shit and piss jokes are wearing you down. Well, uh. What if a dog had fleas. What if you told a dog not to take its flea collar off, but it did anyway, and now it has fleas. That’s a joke, right. Like, structurally, you definitely would look at that and say ‘That’s a joke,’ right? Legally speaking, if anyone tries to not pay you because you’re being paid to write jokes, I mean.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/11/24

So Parker decided to not file charges against Randy after learning the latter had been brutally beaten by his own father. I guess we have a long and emotionally fraught but ultimately fascinating journey ahead of us as we explore the limits of forgiveness and restorative justice and learn whether the cycle of violence can ever be truly broken. Oh, wait, what’s that? You’re saying that Randy mysteriously left town and we’ll never have to deal with him again? Huh. Well, that’s a lot tidier, for sure! I guess all our problems are solved, once again!