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Mary Worth, 9/20/21

Oh my god, everybody, it’s really happening, where by “it” I specifically mean that Wilbur is going to go to the animal shelter to get a dog for all the wrong reasons! Not sure if he’s going to lead with “I’m a real piece of shit and my dumb old neighbor says one of these mongrels will make me marginally more tolerable” or “I’m horny and I hear ladies like guys with dogs,” but I hopefully we’re going to learn that they do not, in fact, give out pets to just anybody.

Marvin, 9/20/21

I have to admit that I find the image in panel one, with a very tiny baby just sitting there outside Marvin’s front door, very funny! The fact he’s alone out there is part of it. He looks like he’s too young to walk or even crawl, and so you have to assume that his parents just plopped him down there and then abandoned him, possibly forever. Anyway, Bitsy probably isn’t going to maul him to death, but if he wanted to, who’s going to stop him? An adult? No adults care about these babies! If the dog doesn’t get them, something else will!

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Gil Thorp, 9/15/21

[clears throat] [extremely Beavis from Beavis and Butt-Head voice] FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! [takes a long, deep breath, representing the years 2016, 2017, and 2018, when the annual Milford bonfire was mysteriously absent] FIRE! FIRE!

Whew, it’s bonfire time again, everybody, guaranteeing a robust grain harvest and fewer barren wombs among the townsfolk! Every year we learn a little something new about the bonfire, and today’s panel one shows us that, assuming the student body doesn’t shlep all those logs by hand to some open field somewhere, it takes place a lot closer to the school itself than I would’ve guessed. Legend has it that Milford will only win a state championship if the flame is allowed to burn the building to the ground!

Funky Winkerbean, 9/15/21

One of the running jokes in the early days of this strip, when it was mostly fun gags about a bunch of goofy teens, was that Les Moore wielded a machine gun as part of his hall monitor duties. I keep waiting in the post-Turn-to-Grim Funkyverse for this to get retconned into the result of some awful school shooting, and that hasn’t happened yet, but until then I’ll console myself with “Majorette Holly’s flesh was a mass of scar tissues due to ever-more-dangerous baton tricks her deranged mother forced her to perform.” I guess today’s colorist glanced at the text and thought, “Oh, these pictures are all supposed to be close-ups of burn wounds, huh,” which is a nice touch.

Daddy Daze, 9/15/21

Look, man, I spent several hours with a couple babies this past weekend and they didn’t seem happy at all! They cried multiple times just because they had to go to the bathroom or were hungry or whatever. I mean, I had to go to the bathroom and was hungry too, but I managed to hold it together, for once!

Mary Worth, 9/15/21

WILBUR WHEN A CAT PISSES IN HIS SPOT ON HIS GIRLFRIEND’S COUCH: Animals are bad! They interfere with me having sex!

WILBUR WHEN HE HEARS A GNOMISH OLD MAN MET A NICE WOMAN JUST BECAUSE HE OWNS A DOG: Animals can help you get sex? Go on, Mary, I’m very interested.

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Shoe, 9/11/21

Spending too much energy thinking about world-building in newspaper comics is probably a waste of time, but [gestures at thousands of posts on this blog] that has certainly never stopped me before, and I feel like today’s Shoe offers us an interesting view into the weird sequence of physical/biological aberrations that led to the strip’s lived environment. Like, they live in the trees, like birds? Only they wear shoes and walk like people? I particularly appreciate the casual way the Perfesser holds onto that branch in panel two, exactly the way a person walking along a rounded log would, and exactly the way a bird hopping along a tree branch (who one would expect to have wings instead of hands, for one thing) wouldn’t. Anyway, I’m not one for biology defining destiny, but surely these mutations are the root cause of these poor birds developing unhealthy societal concepts like “phones” and “the 1970s.”

Mary Worth, 9/11/21

Hey remember when Saul used to be surly jerk who hated everyone and everything until Mary forced him, without his consent, to get in touch with his emotions? Well, it looks like he’s made it his mission to cajole people into doing the emotional work on their own, so they don’t find themselves tricked by Mary into doing it the hard way!