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Crankshaft, 11/25/20

Aw, look at Pam’s little smile in panel three! She’s like, “Normally Dad’s malapropisms make me cringe, but that one … that one’s OK.” She’s wrong, it’s not, it sucks just as bad as all the rest of them. She’s trapped in a horrible wordplay version of Stockholm Syndrome.

Mary Worth, 11/25/20

Tommy, no! Your descent into opioid-fueled madness began when you threw out your back lifting some heavy boxes! You’ve made so much progress — don’t fall back into addiction by eagerly volunteering to tempt fate just to impress Brandy or (even more pathetic) your boss!

Daddy Daze, 11/25/20

Today’s Daddy Daze dispenses with the pretense that the Daddy Daze baby is a “ba”-based interlocutor and shows us its reality for what it is: the Daddy Daze daddy just blathering baroque nonsense to nobody.

Slylock Fox, 11/25/20

I know I say a lot of Slylock Fox scenes have powerful “IT BEGINS” energy vis à vis the moment when the animals rise up to destroy human civilization and create the animal-ruled world where Slylock plies his trade as a detective, but you have to admit that the “IT BEGINS” energy in today’s strip is in fact extremely strong. Those birds are going peck that kid to death, then they’re going to eat the whole bag of birdseed, then they’re going to figure out how to run the birdseed factory, after pecking to death everyone who works there.

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Marvin, 11/21/20

I have to say, I really assumed that Marvin would quickly lose interest in Finn and Gill, the goldfish who hate Marvin, hate each other, and hate themselves, and would fall back into its easy rhythm of jokes about how babies — get this — aren’t toilet trained and almost seem to take a certain joy in pooping themselves. But obviously the narrative appeal of two goldfish who are condemned to spend the rest of their miserable lives with one another is impossible to resist. I was going to say “short, miserable lives” but a little Googling reveals that goldfish when well cared for can live longer than a decade, and anyway Marvin’s been a baby since 1982, so who knows how much longer these guys have to suffer with one another! They’re definitely going to be suffering a lot more once the Marvin crew realizes that fish just poop in their own bowl and then swim around in their own poop until someone cleans it out, which doesn’t strike me as something that’d be a particularly high priority for Marvin’s feckless family.

Mary Worth, 11/21/20

“I know your issues with family addiction and my own drug-using past make you nervous, baby, but let me assure you: you’re my drug now, and you’re the one I’ll do anything to possess, no matter who tries to stop me” –an email from a very smart and self-aware person who definitely is not going to be disappointed

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Crock, 11/18/20

The thing about Crock is that it’s years-old reruns of strips whose whole vibe was already years out of date when they were new, which I know doesn’t sound like the description of something that would be interesting to read every day, but it definitely delivers a fascinating, tangled mess of weird cultural attitudes! Like, today’s strip plays on that well-known belief that “librarians don’t have sex.” I mean, how could they have sex? They’re nerds! But the punchline here undermines this widely held stereotype: the bookmobile guy does, in fact, fuck. His paramour is named “Bertha,” though, so we can be reassured in the implication that she’s at least unattractive, and some small part of the world still makes sense.

Mutts, 11/18/20

This strip may not look like much, but it’s actually the end product of a long legal process in which the large and highly skilled team of lawyers on the payroll of Paws, Inc., ensured Garfieldian dominance over feline Monday-disliking for years to come.

Mary Worth, 11/18/20

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