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Slylock Fox, 1/13/20

As everyone knows, my favorite kind of Slylock Fox is not the kind where he uses (useless) FACTS and (dubious) LOGIC to DESTROY CRIME or whatever, but rather the ones where we get a glimpse of what the strange, terrifying moment of Transition must’ve been like, when the animals suddenly became sapient and human civilization was wiped away in a wave of chaos. Clearly, humanity lost: the only humans we ever see in the world of the strip are Slick Smitty and Count Weirdly, who live on the fringes of the new animal society built on our ruins. But in those first (or last, depending on your point of view) few chaotic days and weeks, things must’ve gotten pretty crazy, and I absolutely believe that some desperate humans eventually resorted to just ramming their cars into the newly aware but still confused animals that were wandering through the cities, still not entirely sure what they were looking at or dealing with. This scene must have been towards the end of the carnage, as the giraffe is being tended in what looks like a human-built hospital; if the H. sapiens behind the wheel survived the crash, they were presumably thrown into a cage at an abandoned veterinary clinic by a jeering hippo or something.

Mary Worth, 1/13/20

Guys! Did you know that January is Thyroid Awareness Month? Are you more aware of disorders that affect the thyroid, such as Hashimoto’s, thanks to the syndicated comic strip Mary Worth? Looks like the PR firm repping the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists finally got tired of banging its head against a wall with Rex Morgan, M.D., and sent this year’s press release over to the Mary Worth team instead.

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Six Chix, 1/10/20

Folks, I’m honestly impressed by how much “a lot going on here” this relatively sparsely drawn Six Chix packs in today. Let’s start with all the ways in which the ostensible “joke” doesn’t actually work: the term “red-handed” is a reference to a murderer being caught with literal blood on their hands, not a reference to the color of human hands themself, most of which are not what you’d call “red”; nevertheless, I guess the punchline here is supposed to be that gray poodles tend to have gray paws, which is severely undermined by the colorist’s choice to make the arrested poodle yellow. Unless there’s some kind of … gray evidence of crime that dogs are known for? Pretty sure dogs don’t have gray blood, though I admit I’m not a scientist or anything. Anyway, I feel bad because all this distracts from what I think is the real horror here: it’s normal for animals to not wear clothes, and it’s fine if your anthropomorphized animals wear clothes, but if you have an animal wearing only a hat and a police badge, I’m going to imagine him as functionally equivalent to a naked person wearing only a hat and a police badge, and honestly the way this dog’s tongue is hanging out and his tail is wagging really isn’t helping with the whole vibe.

Crock, 1/10/20

Speaking of colorist errors, I kind of like that whoever was coloring today’s Crock decided “look, Crock takes place in the desert, we always make the ground bright yellow sand, and I’ll be damned if I figure out what the inside of a salt mine looks like, you hear me? I’m not Google image searching this shit, life is far too short!”

Marvin, 1/10/20

Gotta give credit where it’s due: could you spend the last 38 years, as the comic strip Marvin has, coming up with increasingly weird and off-putting scenarios in which the title character makes eye contact with one or both parents while shitting? I’ll bet you couldn’t. I’ll bet you don’t have the stamina.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/10/20

Whoops, looks like in addition to having a big personality and a tendency to show up unannounced, Aunt Tildy is … a comical drunk? More on the exasperated facial expressions Rex makes about this as events warrant.

Mary Worth, 1/10/20

“Please, doctor! I’m literally melting from panel to panel! Test that thyroid and test it now, with all your might!”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/9/20

A lot changed in the tone of this strip with Terry Beatty took over writing duties for Woody Wilson, but there’s one thing that I’m glad stayed absolutely the same, which is that Rex is a petty little bitch and if you even slightly irritate him just once he will never forget it or forgive you. A normal person would probably be like “Ha ha, Aunt Tildy seems like a kook but if you say she’s part of your extended family I’ll buy it” but Rex has the local SWAT team on speed dial and is definitely waiting for June to admit that Tildy isn’t technical a blood relation so that he can have her forcibly extracted from his home with the help of lots of surplus military equipment.

Dick Tracy, 1/9/20

Dick Tracy, meanwhile, has come a long way since the days when its antagonists wore gimp masks and got eaten alive by rats. Still, you have to admire the low-key perversity involved in having this May-December pairing discussing how their DNA-altered leading lady “nailed” the aura of a robo-seductress right in front of her like she isn’t even there.

Mary Worth, 1/9/20

Man, can you think of a single narrative in the history of human storytelling that wouldn’t have been better if the main conflict were resolved by the protagonist having some tests run on their thyroid, proving that was the source of all their problems after all? I sure can’t! War and Peace, Hamlet, the Bible … all of them would absolutely have benefited from the ol’ thyroid-test denouement. Honestly, if Rise of Skywalker had ended with Rey and Kylo in mid-lightsaber battle and then Rey asked Kylo “Did he test your thyroid?” and then Kylo became a good guy, that would’ve been honestly a much more satisfying end to the entire Star Wars saga than what we actually got.