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Marvin, 1/15/21

So Marvin has been doing the thing where it mostly doesn’t acknowledge the ongoing pandemic but sometimes does, like it’s been doing this week, when it has jokes to make about it, which I’m on the record as being basically fine with for gag-a-day strips like this. What has been bothering me about this week, though, is that the specific joke-topic in question has been about Jeff and Jenny having to cut Marvin’s hair themselves rather than take him to a professional, which makes me as a non-parent wonder: Do parents not … usually cut their babies’ own hair? I remember my mom cutting my hair well into my grade school years but maybe she was unusually thrifty or times have changed? Like, are there salons that specialize in baby haircuts or do you take them to a regular place or what? Whatever the case, please enjoy this strip in which Jeff waxes rhapsodically about the scissors he bought — so sharp, so very sharp — that he’ll be waving around in untrained proximity to his terrible son’s temptingly soft skull.

Mary Worth, 1/15/21

“Oh good, I can demand that she answer all my probing questions now, in public! I’m helping!”

Dennis the Menace 1/15/21

Ha ha, it’s funny because Dennis doesn’t understand what simple English words mean and because he has a serious undiagnosed food allergy!

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Dustin, 1/12/21

You know, I’ve griped about Dustin slamming on millennials (as represented by the strip’s title character), but I haven’t put that much effort into it because, enh, millennials, probably they have it coming. But when you decide to come after librarians? When you say that librarians don’t want people eating and drinking in the library (which literally ruins books that cost money to replace that they’d have to pay out of their shrinking budget) and they don’t want people reshelving books (which patrons aren’t trained to do and if they screw it up it makes books difficult or impossible to find) and they don’t want people talking on their cell phones in the library (this is literally annoying to everybody, who could possibly object to idiots talking loudly on their cell phones in the library being asked to leave) because they’re frumpy martinets who love rules? That’s when I declare that you’re garbage person and I swear a sacred oath to destroy you. Be warned!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/12/21

So it looks like Barney Google and Snuffy Smith has decided on what the defining feature of its hot new character, Li’l Sparky, is going to be: it’s going to be puns based on noises horses make. As we can tell today, a key aspect of this bit is that Li’l Sparky is going to really insist that everyone acknowledge that he’s doing it, until all the other horses (and, I assume, eventually the non-horse characters) come to dislike him. Can’t wait!

Mary Worth, 1/12/21

“Greta, our friend Eve started weeping openly in public but doesn’t want to talk about it. Is there some way I can make this about me?”

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Blondie, 1/7/21

Blondie and Dagwood have matching “best friends” in their next-door neighbors Herb and Tootsie; while Dag is occasionally seen interacting socially with others — his carpool, his coworkers, the guy at the bird store for some reason even though he never buys a bird — he doesn’t really seem to have any other deep friendships, the troubling case of Elmo really being in its own category. Blondie’s social circle is even more limited, as just about the only person we ever see her with outside her family is Tootsie, who is not only Blondie’s friend and neighbor but also her business partner, which seems like a lot of emotional labor to put on one person, frankly! Anyway, today we get a little glimpse into why Blondie and Tootsie only hang out with each other and not anybody else: they’re terrible people who love to cruelly exclude people for minor transgression but love vicious gossip even more.

Mary Worth, 1/7/21

“Jeez,” you’ve probably been thinking, “I know Mary Worth can be slow at times, but how are they going to wring drama out of a couple of old people going on a date to the mall?” Well, you owe me, King Features Syndicate, its parent corporation Hearst Communications, and really the entire Mary Worth-industrial complex an apology, as today the sight of a headless mannequin has triggered Eve’s deep post-hypnotic conditioning and prompted the traumatic emergence of her true identity: a ruthlessly efficient assassin for a shadowy international terrorist organization. (Her signature move was beheading people.)