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Mary Worth, 12/19/19

Man, that smile Mary has in panel two? That’s her realizing that she’s finally making headway in this, her most difficult meddle yet. Sure, Estelle’s been unlucky in love — but can she really be cajoled into falling for Wilbur, who didn’t seem like much of a catch even before his recent downward spiral? It would take all of Mary’s powers to achieve these goals, and the sense of satisfaction success would bring would warm her black heart for weeks. “And yet, despite his obsession with his ex-girlfriend, and his obnoxious drunken behavior, you miss him, Estelle? Very interesting. Very improbable. And very gratifying.”

Marvin, 12/19/19

Meanwhile, speaking of terrible smirks, I at first assumed Marvin was being incredibly smug about how his family had failed at Christmas, again. “Eh?” he seems to be saying. “My father has ruined the holidays, and my parents will fight over it for months to come? Eh?” But I think the reference to A Charlie Brown Christmas speaks to a more specifically mercenary malevolence: the horrible baby thinks that if his family takes in a sad, neglected tree, they’ll become universally beloved, just like Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang, to which I respond: 75% of Peanuts strips aren’t about Charlie Brown shitting himself, kid.

Blondie, 12/19/19

Hey, Blondie trufans! Can you simply not get enough of such classic Blondie gags as “Dagwood carries a huge pile of boxes so you can’t see his face” and “Dagwood has a freakish, improbable hairstyle, with two bits of hair that were originally intended to be cowlicks now extending from his cranium like antennae?” Have you ever wanted both of these tried-and-true bits combined into one unbeatable punchline? Well, today’s strip is for you, my friends.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/14/19

OK, I know that “high concept blindness,” in which the creators of long-running strips in a very specific setting just want to do fairly generic jokes and kind of forget that their characters are all birds or whatever, is a very real thing, but still: I refuse to believe that Hootin’ Holler, an impoverished, isolated town with no apparent governing authority beyond a single sheriff and a single judge, a town where all the buildings are ramshackle, uneven structures clearly built by hand by non-professionals with rooms set off from one another by tattered blankets rather than permanent walls, has a building inspector. Even if such an official were appointed, she would presumably have her time entirely occupied by pleading with residents with children to move out of obvious firetraps, and would have no opportunity to gossip.

Mary Worth, 12/14/19

A legitimate complaint about Zak’s role in Mary Worth is that he’s a sexy but bland wish-fulfillment fantasy, a hot, rich younger man who is extremely solicitous of his older girlfriend but otherwise has no real obvious personality or inner life of his own, and certainly no negative qualities that might make him interesting. Today, though, one of his serious flaws has at last been revealed: he thinks Wilbur Weston, of all people, is “pretty cool.”

Pluggers, 12/14/19

I’d like to think that this plugger is sitting in his truck in the parking lot of the mall, shocked, shocked, that the two fairly specific items he was looking for weren’t available, and thinking about what this world’s come to, where our civilization went wrong. Real heavy stuff! Anyway, you can find doodads pretty easily on the internet these days, you’re welcome pluggers

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Mary Worth, 12/9/19

Say what you will about this “Wilbur & Estelle & Zak & Iris” storyline, but it keeps zagging when I expect it to zig, by which I mean I never in a million years would’ve guessed that Wilbur and Zak, both heartbroken because their ladyfriends dumped them for wholly baffling reasons (because they’re public embarrassments with serious alcohol problems who aren’t over their ex and menopause, respectively), would end up bellying up to Santa Royale’s one vaguely seedy bar together and engaging in some good old fashioned male bonding. Anyway, Zak is nursing what’s presumably a local craft beer and Wilbur’s obviously on day twelve of a scotch bender, so Wilbur having what’s Zak’s having will actually sober him up a bit, hopefully keeping him coherent enough so we hear every detail of the restraining order Estelle got against him post-boombox incident. “The Charterstone laundry room is less than 150 yards from her apartment so I haven’t been able to wash any of my clothes for weeks, Zak. Weeks!”

Gil Thorp, 12/9/19

Welp, we’ve wrapped up the Chance Macy/Chet Ballard/Charlie Roh story, and, uh, it seems the football team is not headed for the playdowns, despite the revival of the bonfire this year, because we’ve just rolled right into the winter storyline, which seems to be about … a girl named Alexa, like the popular electronic assistant from Amazon, and all the other kids are making jokes about it? This seems fairly realistic, as teens are generally pretty shitty and also much less funny than they think they are, but I’m not sure it’s actually that great a basis for a months-long comics plot.

Dick Tracy, 12/9/19

You know what is a great basis for a months-long comics plot? A washed-up narcissistic old actor, whose enormous office is decorated with larger-than-life posters of himself, following up his successful production of Our Town with a wildly ill-conceived plan for stage version of Metropolis starring a woman transformed via alien DNA. This is a million times better than Steve Roper and Mike Nomad tracking down rogue carnies or whatever.

Crock, 12/9/19

I’ve always understood “entertainment center” to mean a big piece of furniture that has spots for your TV, DVD player, stereo, etc., which more or less went out of fashion when flatscreen TVs came onto the scene in the mid-to-late ’00s, and never would’ve been much of a gift item anyway. But I guess I’m overthinking this strip, where the punchline is that the real entertainment center is an old man’s dick.