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Mary Worth, 4/26/22

Oh snap, shocking twist! Young Helen used to be young Ian’s … student? Coworker? It’s honestly not clear to me how old either of them is supposed to be now, or whatever the age that each of them is supposed to be is the same as the age the other one is supposed to be, or if they’re 10 or 20 years apart or what. But the point is that clearly she and Ian have some unfinished emotional business, as hinted at on Sunday. I can’t decide which possibility I like better: that the two of them had a torrid pre-Toby relationship, or if Helen was a student who had an unconsummated crush on Ian and is so upset with Toby now because she can’t stand to see another smitten young person being emotionally toyed with by yet another Professor Cameron.

Also, it’s worth (ha!) noting that Ian and Toby moved into Charterstone relatively recently, by which I mean 42 years ago but also they appeared to be roughly the same ages then that they are now. So I certainly hope that Helen moved across the country from wherever she lived before and got this community college gig specifically for Ian-stalking purposes.

Shoe, 4/26/22

Ha ha, yes, it’s funny because Roz is experiencing significant financial difficulties, but mostly I want to point out that her last name doesn’t appear on either the Shoe (comic) Wikipedia page or her character page on the official Shoe website. Either there’s some real deep lore held securely at MacNellyCo HQ that only the strip’s highly paid team of gag writers are allowed to access, or today’s gag writer just decided to call an audible and BAM! “Roz Specklehen” is canon now! Who says you can’t make your mark in this world?

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Pluggers, 4/24/22

When I lived in Oakland, California, there was a plumber’s truck that parked near my apartment building all the time with the business name “KING OF THEM ALL” emblazoned on the side of it. This was in 1999 or so, so it wasn’t a given that every business would be online, but they also had a URL proudly emblazoned on the side, “kingofthemall.com”, and I always thought that whoever was the King of the Mall must have been pretty pissed! Anyway, it’s now the year 2022, kingofthemall.com is an SEO spam site filled with uncanny valley prose written by a machine, nobody cares about URLs any more anyway because now to find out about a business’s hours or contact information you have to look on their Instagram stories for some reason, and Pluggers are here to inform you that if your small vehicle-based business has an even vaguely creative name, you have given up your plugger status no matter how blue-collar you are. Apologies to the King Of Them All, wherever you are.

Dick Tracy, 4/24/22

Gotta respect that Dick Tracy, whose antagonists all have based their entire identity on some weirdo shtick, is willing to engage in banter with said antagonists about said shtick. This is more important to the criminals of Neo-Chicago than their so-called “civil rights,” which is good because Dick Tracy definitely will be violating those.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/24/22

Oh dang, is our hero, the “Street Sweeper,” who apparently built his vigilante identity around his quotidian day job, going to become an super villain? If some guy pissed all over the floor and told me “Hey buddy, you missed a bit over there,” that would do it for me! I wouldn’t take offense at random passersby making fun of my identity, though. That’s just part of the risk of being a superhero, and you need to develop a thick skin against those sorts of criticisms. But the pee thing? Unacceptable.

Mary Worth, 4/24/22

Haha, yes, at last some real Ian drama, which is all I’ve ever craved from this Toby storyline! Were Ian and Helen enemies? Lovers? Enemies to lovers, one of the most popular tropes in the romance genre? Can’t wait to find out!

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Gil Thorp, 4/23/22

Despite having become, late in my life and to my own surprise, a fervent Dodgers fan, at first I was unable to get that worked up about the Houston Astro’s sign-stealing scandal of the mid-to-late ’10s that probably cost the Dodgers the World Series in 2017. After all, surely if it’s legal to for one teammate to try to surreptitiously convey information to another during play, it should also be legal for the other team to try do figure out the content of that communication if they can? Well, it turned out that the Astros were dirtier than that — they made use of the cameras in the reply booth to observe other teams’ signals and sent information via electronic buzzers taped to their own players’ bodies — but I still felt like the whole thing raised some interesting philosophical questions, questions which this brewing Gil Thorp storyline is also going to explore! For instance: if it’s legal for the catcher to use hand gestures to send encoded information to the pitcher, why shouldn’t it be legal for the catcher to instead send that encoded information to one of the infielders, who then encodes that information in baseball chatter for the pitcher, who can’t see the catcher because he’s secretly and tragically going blind? I’m very intrigued, though I assume Gil’s typical response to philosophical questions is the same as his typical response to everything else, which is to say three months of ignoring it followed by a lot of yelling.

Mary Worth, 4/23/22

“She’s in her forties or fifties, medium height, short straight hair … I don’t know why I’m giving you a physical description, that’s not what you asked for! … unless you’re standing by the sink, silently staring off into the middle distance with steely resolve, like you’re thinking of paid killers you can hire … ha ha, just kidding, of course … but what if…?”