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Curtis, 12/23/20

Good news, everyone! Curtis’s parents are going to cure coronavirus!

Funky Winkerbean, 12/23/20

Good news, everyone! Thanks to the internet, you no longer have to worry about the whole Funky Winkerbean gang showing up outside your house uninvited!

Crock, 12/23/20

Good news, everyone! Women have finally invented a beer mug with a hidden microchip in it!

Mary Worth, 12/23/20

Good news, everyone! Tommy has gotten a part-time job as a school monitor! I’m not sure what a “school monitor” is — is it a euphemism for an in-school cop like “resource officer,” or maybe someone who’s supposed to kind of act like an in-school cop but doesn’t have any actual legal police authority? — but if there’s one thing I know about teens and/or tweens, it’s that if the guy who used to give cringe-y anti-drug talks to their class suddenly popped up as a vaguely defined authority figure without much actual authority, the cruelty and bullying would be relentless. Excited to see Tommy go into a downward emotional spiral that brings him back to the pill bottle/meth pipe!

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Mary Worth, 12/15/20

Mary’s advice to Tommy was basically just to keep doing the good stuff he was doing and not give up on himself, and that positive things would come of that. She didn’t promise that Brandy would take him back as a result, but now that Tommy’s come bearing good news and the raw material for salmon squares, Mary wants all the specifics. She has advice-giving metrics she needs to hit, and she needs hard data on relationship re-engagement for the Q4’20 PowerPoint she’s putting together for her presentation to the board.

Gil Thorp, 12/15/20

Ah yes, it’s the most sacred moment in any Gil Thorp storyline: the Ceremonial Rattling Off Of The Names. Sometimes this is just an excuse for the strip to later on be like “we did too tell you who all these people are, you can’t complain just because our sports action is wholly baffling,” but sometimes it’s an opportunity to set up the important characters for the coming storylines. Like this Doug Guthrie fella! Turns out that he’s good at basketball but won’t fully pay attention to Coaches Gil and Kaz just because they’re “boring” and “spend all day in their office yelling names at each other.” Hopefully this twerp will get his priorities in order, and soon!

Dick Tracy, 12/15/20

This is an honestly very educational strip about what happens in an underground marketplace where there’s no set of shared best practices for industry professionals and no universally trusted third-party regulatory body with jurisdiction over product labelling. Anyway, when it comes to people who probably won’t notice or react badly if they do notice when you sell them a somewhat smaller amount of merchandise than what you originally promised for a set price, definitely cocaine addicts are the first group that I think of.

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Dick Tracy, 12/8/20

As you may or may not know, there were two different Dragnet series: a black-and-white one that ran for most of the 1950s, and a new one, in color, that ran from 1967 to 1970. Both starred the extremely square Jack Webb as the extremely square Joe Friday, but in the latter show, as you might imagine, he spent a lot of energy cracking down on hippies. I have seen one (1) episode of this, as a child, and it made a huge impression on me, as it’s about two hippie parents who tragically let their daughter drown in a bathtub because they were high out of their minds on marijuana, and a hippie who had been helping Joe Friday with his investigation shows up at the police station at the end having shaved and put on a suit and tie, announcing he still wants to change things for the better, but now he’s going to work within the system, as a journalist. Anyway, the only episode with a detailed plot description on Wikipedia is called “The LSD Story,” and it’s not dissimilar, so I assume they’re all like this, and, look, I laugh but I can kind of forgive it in 1967, on TV show that square adults were making. But in 2020? When the hippies are the old people now? And when, in Dick Tracy, a drug dealer named “Dollar Bill” (his shtick is the dollar bill sticking out of his headband, and you can tell he’s a hippie because he’s wearing sandals in the snow) is arguing with a guy named “Aquarius” about “candy” for his girlfriend “Cheesecake”? You have to ask, how many layers of nostalgia-irony are we working on? Like, is this what you think hippies are (were?) like, or are you trying to emulate the notoriously square Dick Tracy of the era in which hippies were actually a thing? This strip has since its reboot been a heady brew of neo-nostalgia, and it’s reached a point where it’s messing with my sense of time, space, and self more than any drug “Dollar Bill” could sell me.

Gasoline Alley, 12/8/20

EXTREMELY QUICK GASOLINE ALLEY PLOT RECAP: Slim was going to pretend to be a ghost to scare his terrible family out of his home instead of just asking them firmly to leave like a person with dignity and self-respect, but then some real ghosts scared them off instead. Today we learn that in Gasoline Alley’s cosmology, there’s no real distinction between “ghosts” and “angels,” and damned souls wander our plane as wraiths, demanding our approbation so that they can move on to the next stage of existence.

Mary Worth, 12/8/20

“Plus everyone knows the middle of the night on the boardwalk is the best time and place to buy drugs! Wait, did I say that part out loud?”