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Mary Worth, 10/24/24

If I know Mary Worth, and I’d like to think at this point that I do, I’m reasonably sure that Estelle and Dr. Ed will, in fact, end up back together. However, I appreciate the fact that she’s maintaining a somewhat realistic attitude about the matter. Like, yeah, maybe you have some regrets, but the guy whose engagement ring you hurled into his chest at full force in front of a bunch people at his vet clinic — the vet clinic where he was overworked and you started volunteering to help out at, from which you stormed out that day and presumably have not been back since — that guy might not be in the headspace to pick up where you left off. And that’s fair! Can’t hurt to ask, but it’s fair if he says no! At least a vision direct from God will keep her from marrying Wilbur, even if it means dying alone!

Hagar the Horrible, 10/24/24

Because I’m the specific kind of dork that I am, my immediate thought reading this strip was, “Wait, are these Vikings supposed to be a bride-price culture or a dowry culture? You can’t have it both ways!” Well, after doing a little research, it turns out the dichotomy I half remember a friend of mine explaining to me when she was taking Anthropology 101 during our freshman year of college was a little reductive, because you can have it both ways and the Vikings did: their marriage rituals were preceded by an elaborate and reciprocal series of gift exchanges between the bride’s and groom’s families. Now, that sounds like a big waste of time to me because you end up with the same amount of money at the end of it that you started with, but I guess it helped establish and tighten kinship bonds or something. Whatever, I’m not going to tell them how to live their lives! Wouldn’t do much good anyway, seeing as they’re all dead.

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Hi and Lois, 10/20/24

It’s a bold choice to have Hi and Lois make direct eye contact with you, the reader, in the final panel here. This isn’t just a cute domestic scene; it’s a polemical tract, tailored to urge all of us to not be so quick to “tidy” that we purge beloved memories of our past. Frankly, I’m glad I didn’t read this before I spent a lot of time and energy reorganizing my closet a couple weekends ago, as I’d probably still have a bunch of shirts I never wear hanging up in there. “Let’s leave it! It’s a time capsule!” I’d tell my increasingly irritated wife.

Family Circus, 10/20/24

The Family Circus’ bread and butter is what I like to call “darndest thing saying,” which is the Keane Kids trying to explain some aspect of the world or talk like a smart adult but fucking it up very badly, due to idiocy. However, today’s installment makes a fatal misstep, because one of the darndest things they say is actually correct! We really do call autumn “fall” because of falling leaves — in fact, the original phrase was “fall of the leaf.” Does Billy, like me, spend his time entertaining himself exploring word origins on the Online Etymology Dictionary site? If so, he probably enjoyed learning that “autumn” comes to us from Latin but may ultimately have an Etruscan root, and that there is in fact no common Indo-European word for the period between summer and winter, which may imply that the steppe herders of the proto-Indo European urheimat did not perceive it as a distinct season.

Mary Worth, 10/20/24

I think Wilbur has finally hit his logical endpoint as a character: he has become the human embodiment of rock bottom. The prospect of marrying him is so vile and horrifying as to make literally any alternate scenario seem preferable. The middle panel in the bottom row comes from Estelle’s fictional dreamscape, but I assume it will haunt your very real nightmares tonight, as it will mine.

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Mary Worth, 10/14/24

“You’re right, Mary! I made a decision meant to avoid pain of the type I had suffered before, but now, under your careful guidance, I’ve learned that was a mistake. I’m ready to marry yet another emotionally unavailable workaholic! I’m ready to be a widow twice over! Thank you, Mary, for breaking my spirit!”

Intelligent Life, 10/14/24

Sure, this comic strip conflates the zoot suit, popularized by African- and Mexican-Americans in the 1940s, with a suit cut in a totally different style that was worn by the Joker as portrayed by Cesar Romero, a man of Spanish and Cuban descent, which isn’t great. On the other hand, it got me to do a little Googling and discover that for a mere $950 you could be the owner of a genuine “Jokers Wild Purple” zoot suit, so who’s to say if it’s good or bad?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/14/24

I kind of love Silas’s emotion affect in the second panel here: he’s both pleased and a little puzzled. Have Snuffy and his fellow primitive denizens of Hootin’ Holler finally developed the ability to understand and even sympathize with the emotions of others? Silas had never thought he’d see the day, but his store is the lone outpost of globally-scaled free-market capitalism in this otherwise backwards region, and he’s ready to profit off this local development with the sale of some of the sympathy cards he ordered a while back, just in case.