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Mark Trail, 6/7/21

Mark is off battling influencers, and Cherry is about to do battle with an HOA over native plants, so where does that leave Rusty? Well, Rusty is about to have a sleepover pizza party with Oscar winner Robert Shaw! What do you think they’re going to talk about? Jaws or The Sting would be the obvious choice, but you never know: Rusty might want to hear stories about his time in the ’50s doing Shakespeare at the Old Vic. He’s not a baby, after all!

Mary Worth, 6/7/21

Oh, dear, it looks like we’re getting to that time in a great Mary Worth storyline where I just post every strip! Anyway, today Ashlee asks Drew if he’s bummed about killing someone on the operating table but it turns out he’s just sad about his fancy watch, which she stole, and I challenge anyone working in comedy today to come up with something funnier than this. You can’t, it’s the peak of humor and we’ll be talking about this day for years to come. (Drew did kill someone on the operating table, of course, but he stopped feeling anything about that sort of thing years ago.)

Marvin, 6/7/21

Speaking of people feeling things, Marvin’s grandfather’s stunned facial expression in the final panel here is wholly appropriate. “Gee,” he’s thinking, “I thought we were best friends, but I never guessed how bleak and loveless his marriage was! I suppose you truly never can know another person.”

Crankshaft, 6/7/21

Wow, pretty rude of Crankshaft and his girlfriend to be going on and on about how great drive-in theaters are just days after his own grandson’s movie theater closed due to lack of customers. On the other hand, maybe it was a sign of respect that Crankshaft never went and had sex and/or made terrible puns in Max’s place of business.

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Baby Blues, 6/5/21

Imagine that you were on the verge of experiencing some marital intimacy with your husband, when suddenly you realized your cheek was resting on his huge, fleshy proboscis, which is longer as his arm and twice as thick. Truly harrowing. You too would find whatever way you could to short-circuit the romantic moment as quickly as possible.

Crankshaft, 6/5/21

Were you worried that Max and Hannah (I accidentally called her Mindy the other day, apologies, Mindy is his sister with straight blonde hair and Hannah is his wife with wavy blonde hair, we regret the error) weren’t going to stay horny for one another now that their business has gone under and their dream has been crushed and they’ve been forced to move in with Max’s parents and his terrible grandfather, Crankshaft? Well, don’t worry. They’re still horny for each other! Funkyverse characters do not get less horny when confronted with despair, because otherwise their world would’ve been depopulated generations ago. If anything, the gloom just eggs them on!

Mary Worth, 6/5/21

A fun thing about Mary Worth is that it wants to depict Ashlee’s upbringing as unspeakably depraved and the reason why she’s a broken, amoral grifter, but it’s a newspaper comic strip and can’t get too dark so instead her dad just got arrested for unspecified reasons and her mom had a job where she had to bare her midriff to serve chicken wings to bronies. Seems perfectly wholesome, honestly!

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The Lockhorns, 6/4/21

Having done this blog for many years, I can tell you that there is definitely a weekly rhythm to many of the comics. Hopefully if you’re a reader of this blog, you are aware of enough comics “inside baseball” knowledge that you know that individual comics aren’t each written the day before they’re published or anything like that. They’re submitted weeks in advance, in Monday-through-Saturday chunks (Sunday strips are submitted separately and have to be sent in even earlier). And while I’m sure most cartoonists don’t sit down and power through six comics in one sitting, as you get towards the end of the week you definitely start to get some “I’m almost done with this, fuck it” vibes. I feel strongly that today’s Lockhorns, where Leroy assures Loretta that alcoholism is fine, actually, and he’s not sure why it gets such a bad rap, fits that bill, and yet (because I contain multitudes) I also think it’s pretty great, because sometimes you want that energy on a Friday, you know?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/4/21

You know what absolutely has not been phoned in, though? Today’s Rex Morgan, M.D. Just a symphony of incredible facial expressions from two guys who know they’re not supposed to find their kids incredibly irritating and so they won’t say that they’re incredibly irritating but they absolutely find all their little antics insufferable and can’t wait until they’re off at college or whatever. “He can’t see the face I’m making, so he probably assumes I actually love my kid, even though every moment I spend with them is a chore,” both men are thinking.

Mary Worth, 6/4/21

You know what would really help out Rex and Buck? If there were like a pane of thick, soundproof glass between them and their kids, and there was a phone that ostensibly let you talk to the person on the other side, but the phone wasn’t attached to anything, so it didn’t work. Ideally it would be the kid on the jail side of the glass, of course.