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Mary Worth, 5/5/21

Say what you will about this “Drew the dissatisfied Instadoc” storyline, but it’s been hard to predict its twists and turns! Like, is Drew going to be bamboozled? Seduced? Will Ashlee actually become the next Bella Hadid, with Drew as her svengali along for the ride? Anyway, based on today’s strip I’m foreseeing an extremely exciting sequence of events, where Drew has to cancel because of a work thing, and then Ashlee gets miffed and passive aggressively fails to follow up to schedule a new photoshoot and eventually quietly unfollows him, and then like three months later Drew thinks, “Wow, remember Ashlee? She was pretty but I guess some things aren’t meant to be.” This will take eight to eleven months.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/5/21

What sort of wonderful surprises can increasingly unavoidable Rex Morgan recurring character Buck Wise deliver to our heroes? Could he, say, use his industry connections to arrange a meeting between Sarah and her favorite author? Ha ha, no, of course not. That would be absurd. He could make sure her fan letter gets actually read, though! Or at least he could tell her that it would get actually read, which from her point of view would probably end up amounting to the same thing.

Shoe, 5/5/21

I’ve spent more time than I care to admit trying to figure out the whole deal with Skyler and the Perfesser’s relationship, which I now regret as today’s strip makes it pretty clear that relationship is entirely transactional.

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Mary Worth, 5/2/21

I am honestly not sure where this is going, by which I mean that I am honestly not sure how stupid we’re supposed to think Dr. Drew is! Like, is this a transparent flirtation, with the unlikely “Oh, your amateur photography will be like your medical mission!” pitch just the flimsiest possible pretext to exchange phone numbers as a prelude to boning? Juliette Binoche’s quote up top seems to imply this! On the other hand, Drew is quite dumb, so it’s possible that he’s taken Ashlee’s words to heart and now thinks that there’s more than one way to heal: you can do it with a scalpel, or with a camera and the full set of Instagram filters. This will lull him into a false sense of complacency when Ashlee lures him to the remote, picturesque waterfall where her accomplices will harvest his organs, which will allow him to heal a number of fabulously wealthy Russian oligarchs and/or Gulf emirs, when you think about it.

Marvin, 5/2/21

Wow, Marvin just had the craziest, most unlikely dream: his family wanted to spend time with him! Oh, and he also violated various copyrights held by Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc., I guess.

Shoe, 5/2/21

GOD DAMN IT ROZ YOU’RE A BIRD

EVERYONE IN THIS STRIP IS A BIRD

YOU’VE GOT FEATHERS IN YOUR DRAIN, ROZ

NOT HAIR, FEATHERS

GOD DAMN IT

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Mary Worth, 4/29/21

There’s a lot of suspension of disbelief that goes into enjoying a comic strip like Mary Worth, and sometimes I can pull it off and sometimes I can’t. For instance, I absolutely refuse to believe that Drew has managed to become mildly Instagram famous without ever letting slip in one of his captions that he’s a doctor, and yet immediately upon being presented with his meal blurted out “It looks better than the hospital cafeteria food that I’m very familiar with because of all the time I spend in a hospital — and not as a patient! [wink wink]” That sandwich looks like shit, by the way, and also the side of slaw Ashlee so grandly announced is nowhere to be seen, so I’m assuming Northview’s cafeteria is of particularly low quality.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/29/21

If you know me, you know that few things exercise my deranged mind like trying to figure out the socioeconomic/political situation of Hootin’ Holler, so today I’m less interested in Uriah unicycling the mail all over the region than I am in the fact that Silas, who is not a government official but the proprietor of the town’s only store, is paying for his transportation. My current theory: the Post Office was violently ejected from the town decades ago, possibly in reaction to its attempt to impose the “number of the beast” in the form of zip codes. Silas, who needs to maintain a connection to the outside world in order to keep his store of manufactured goods stocked, is the only person still receiving mail, and he’s set Uriah up as his private delivery man, charging townsfolk outrageous markup over regular postage rates. For legal reasons, he refers to his delivery service as the “Newnited States Post Office.”

The Phantom, 4/29/21

I make fun of soap strips all the time when they’re inadvertently funny, so I feel obligated to point out when they’re successfully funny on purpose, like when Heloise begins a Heloise-centric storyline by describing her dad as “off somewhere punching a guy,” an incident I hope we never hear any more details on.