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Mary Worth, 7/30/24

A recurring question that arises in the increasingly Wilbur-focused era of Mary Worth we find ourselves in is: are we getting so much Wilbur because we’re expected to like and support him, or are we being repeatedly shown his worst humiliations, in order to create a strip that is nothing more than his personal hell? I’ve had my doubts, but today’s strip, in which Wilbur tells an incredulous fish that he communicated with another dead fish in a dream, and then we smash cut to Wilbur’s ex, whom Wilbur named the dead fish after, in the midst of an extremely erotic canoodle with her handsome boyfriend, certainly seems to point in one direction fairly strongly.

Blondie, 7/30/24

Blondie absolutely loves a “what’s a universal, non-controversial cultural touchstone of the moment we can do extremely lazy jokes about,” and obviously the Olympics are the pinnacle of that sort of thing, with the added advantage that they last for weeks. Yesterday we had a mildly funny joke about Dagwood getting in trouble for streaming the Olympics on his phone during a work meeting, but I’m actually kind of appalled by today’s strip, which seems to imply that Olympic runners have their performance scored by judges rather than simply being timed to see who finishes the event the fastest.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/30/24

I love it when a work of art sparks a conversation, raising not one but multiple questions about its characters and its world. For instance, today’s Snuffy Smith has me asking “Doesn’t ‘busking’ usually happen on a sidewalk in a big city? Why is Jughaid doing it out in the middle of an open field somewhere” but also “Doesn’t Jughaid wear that stupid hat all the time? Does Ol’ Bullet repeatedly attack him when he does, and if so why don’t we get to see it more often?”

Shoe, 7/30/24

Ha ha! A laugh track, get it? Because his political promises are laughable! Good one! Say, does anyone involved in the creation of Shoe know what a “website” is and how one works? Like have they ever used the internet, at all?

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Mary Worth, 7/28/24

Real talk: my initial thought reading the throwaway panels was “Ha ha, Wilbur wet the bed!” But no, actually, he finally achieved emotional closure about his dead fish because he had a dream where the fish called him (or his fishy dream avatar) “dad” and swam away with his friends into the fish afterlife, and then he woke up crying, which is substantially less dignified than wetting the bed.

Dennis the Menace, 7/28/24

You ever wonder what Henry and Alice talk about when they have the house to themselves, presumably because Dennis is next door making Mr. Wilson’s life miserable? Well, apparently they reflect on past Dennis menacing incidents, including ones so traumatizing that just the memory of them makes Alice feel a need to go lie down, so I have to admit my respect for his menacing game just went up exponentially.

Blondie, 7/28/24

If I walked into my barbershop and found a barber lounging casually in the chair, and he looked me right in the eye and said “Showtime!”, I would assume that I would soon be on the floor bleeding out from numerous wounds inflicted by a straight razor. Dagwood absolutely should be thankful that all he endured was some sub-par conversation!

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Mary Worth, 7/26/24

Oh, man, sorry I thought this was going to be something “normal” like Wilbur deciding to murder his fish for attention, when in fact he’s going to dream/fantasize about merging with his dead fish as some kind of nearsighted human/fish hybrid. A dead one, too! Remember how he was speculating yesterday about fish heaven? Well, in his imagining, this is fish heaven, when a fish transcends its fishy form and becomes merged with Wilbur. Imagine the sick sort of God who would consider such a nightmare to be a reward for a life well lived: this is the deity that Wilbur worships.

Gil Thorp, 7/26/24

Speaking of cruel Gods, imagine if you were invited, just briefly, to bask in the holy radiance of your Creators, except that it has to take the form of walking by a couple of dudes sitting behind a folding table at Comic-Con, where you’ll be surrounded by absolute dorks. Would probably take a lot of the mystery out of the whole thing, right?

Pluggers, 7/26/24

A lot of people use my Pluggers commentary as evidence that I’m a coastal elitist who hates real, down-home Americans from the heartland, but nothing I’ve ever said about pluggers is anywhere close to as contemptuous as “pluggers get trapped in port-a-pottys all the time, probably they fall down in there accidentally and get all covered with really nasty piss and shit, that’s a classic plugger situation and that’s the tea, sis.”