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Mary Worth, 5/23/22

This upcoming storyline can’t possibly be about Dawn and what’s-his-face, the Star Wars nerd whose name the narration box can’t even be bothered to remember so I’m definitely not looking it up, because they’re boring losers. The way Mary’s looking straight at us in the first panel seems like a challenge: which character will have their brain baked by the summer sun until they finally allow themselves the awful experience of knowing another and being known in turn? Will it be Mary? Is Mary going to see if she can make 2022 “hot Mary summer” and finally fall in love? And how will Dr. Jeff fit into the picture? Will she at least have the decency to break up with him first, like the time she had a dalliance with a guy who she cruised at his own mother’s funeral? Or will she just keep him completely in the dark, like that time she went to New York and romanced a Broadway legend? I for one am, predictably, excited to find out.

Beetle Bailey, 5/23/22

Now, a lot of people are going to be very focused on Sarge, strung up and entangled in flypaper as if he himself were some huge, grotesque insect, his tongue having been stuck in this trap as he’s sweated and squirmed for who knows how long. But me? I’m still fixated on Cookie’s line in panel one: “I’m anxious to see how many flies I caught in my traps last night,” he says to nobody, with a huge smile on his face. Definitely the voice he’s using to say this sounds like Renfield from the Bela Lugosi Dracula, right? That’s the only option here?

Dick Tracy, 5/23/22

Old-school nightmaretown Dick Tracy reached its apogee in the very last of the Locher/Brozman strips, in which a gimp-suited murderer was eaten alive by rats. The team over the last decade has not gone down that road very much, but I have to say that eating rats, while not as gross, is definitely a first step in that direction.

Marvin, 5/23/22

Man, he knows his butthole is where the poop exits from! That’s the not the problem! It’s the timing and circumstances of the exiting that are the issue here! You may walk on your hind legs and have rudimentary literacy, but you aren’t as smart a dog as you think!

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Shoe, 5/20/22

Look, Roz, I know you had to come up with an insult on the fly here, and so I guess I should be impressed by the extremely labored pun your mind just generated, but the truth is that it’s not just the Perfesser’s pants you should be roasting. Or are we meant to understand you find this garish pattern perfectly acceptable on a suit jacket, but somehow the matching pants put it over the line for you? I give you an A for effort but 5/10 on execution, keep working at it.

Blondie, 5/20/22

I’ve very intrigued by the question of how Dagwood’s posture and facial expression in the first panel fits in with the revelations over the rest of the strip. Is he expertly faking his usual cringe so Mr. Dithers won’t realize that he can’t hear a word of abuse? Or does Dithers’s diatribe have a physical force that still knocks Dagwood backwards, quite separate from its semantic content?

Mary Worth, 5/20/22

He’ll do anything for you, Toby. Anything. He’ll come down to where you work and engage in some extremely light PDA! Can you imagine a greater hero? I certainly can’t!

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Mary Worth, 5/18/22

Oh, wow, not only has l’affaire HelenCal ended with Ian and Toby’s past and potential future (respectively) student entanglements safely banished, but it seems the Camerons have learned a valuable lesson: namely, that performing their sexual attraction for the benefit of others is just the thing they need to rekindle that attraction and indeed spark it to new and intensely erotic heights! Look for Charterstone’s #1 intellectual academic couple to engage in increasingly public and risky erotic rendezvous in the coming months.

Sally Forth, 5/18/22

Sally Forth, meanwhile, is approaching much more transgressive territory than mere exhibitionism: no, Ted and Sally are making their first ever neighbor friend and are immediately veering into cuckoldry. Look at how Sally sweats with delicious anxiety as their neighbor moves boldly into her personal space! Ted seems to have vanished entirely after the first panel, but I assume he’s bearing the same intrigued expression you can half see on him there.

Dennis the Menace, 5/18/22

This is a profoundly sad strip. Dennis is begging — begging — his father to stop shit-talking his friends because he knows he’ll blurt all those insults out in front of them, he wants to stop but he can’t stop, not matter how hard he tries. Henry, meanwhile, looks not upset or sympathetic but bored. “Look, kid,” he’s thinking, “You’ve gotta menace these guys. I know it’s no fun, but it’s what the people want. It’s the name of the strip. It pays the bills around here.”