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Dustin, 5/16/20

Ugh, I spent way too much time trying to figure out what the context for this even is. Like, she met him at the Dollar Store, where she was disgusted by his economic prospects, and then she … agreed to go on a date with him? Invited him to this party, or perhaps accepted an invite to the same? Happened to run into him at a party and took the opportunity to talk smack about him within what is clearly earshot? Damn it I need the backstory here

Mary Worth, 5/16/20

We must truly be at the final, blessed end of the Dawn-Jared story, because we’re being shown the pinnacle of romantic love in the Worthiverse: Dr. Jeff and Mary, a happy, devoted couple, if you forget all the times that Mary rejected his marriage proposals, or the time Mary put the moves on a local city councilman at his own mother’s funeral, or the time she almost up and moved to New York to live with her handsome Broadway crush, or the time she conveniently forgot Jeff was allergic to cats. Truly, Dawn and Jared have such bliss to aspire to!

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The Phantom, 5/14/20

The current Phantom poaching storyline has been boring enough that I haven’t covered it on this blog, at all, but if you think I’m going to not comment about a grinning guy sawing a lion heart in half in the daily newspaper, you’ve got another thing coming! Anyway, basically the plot was that an evil American poacher wounded a lion but didn’t pursue it to kill it, because he was a coward in addition to being evil, and so after the Ghost Who Saws Lion Hearts In Half handed over the poacher to Llongo Justice, he tracked down the wounded lion to put it out of its misery. And, well, you know, hunting lions is bad, but if things have come together in such a way that you have to a hunt a lion, for the lion’s sake, then you might as well cut the lion’s heart in half and feed part to your semi-tame wolf, right? Go ahead and saw it in half! It’s A-OK, in this fairly contrived scenario!

Mary Worth, 5/14/20

Nothing much to say about today’s Mary Worth except holy cow check out Jared’s absolute piece of shit car! I love that even though he’s the “winner” in his battle for Dawn’s affections, the strip wants to be very clear that his life is still sad and pathetic. Is that … duct tape? Are those two relatively small pieces of duct tape all that’s keeping the hood from flying open, which will presumably result in Jared veering wildly off the road and killing them both? Let’s hope!

Pluggers, 5/14/20

So you better not tell them to do it or they’ll stop doing it just to spite you and prove you’re not the boss of them, they don’t care how good an idea it is or how many people they kill

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Mary Worth, 5/12/20

A fun thing about even a pretty narratively explicit medium like the comics is that you can always fill in some of the lacunae with your mind to create the version of the story you most want to read. For instance, there’s nothing in the second panel of today’s Mary Worth making it explicit that there’s a long, lingering silence after Dawn says “I worked things out with Hugo” — a sentence that any normal human would interpret to mean that Dawn and Hugo had patched things up and would continue to operate as a couple, leaving Jared either as a side piece or, more likely, a piece of rejected romantic detritus on the side of the road — but there’s nothing that strictly speaking precludes you from imagining that silence, either. So I’m imagining it. I’m imagining Dawn running into Jared’s arms off the jetway, nestling her chin on his shoulder, and saying, enraptured, “I worked things out with Hugo!” and letting that sit there for a minute, only moving on to “We agreed to be friends!” after his big, ugly, heaving sobs have started and can’t be stopped.

Gasoline Alley, 5/12/20

In case you’re wondering, the actual line in question is “Folks these days just don’t do nothin’ simply for the love of it.” So yeah, this guy will dip into the lyrical repetoire of popular music in order to make his rhetorical point, but he’ll be damned if he submits to these punks’ grammatical barbarism.