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Mary Worth, 6/18/19

Oh, hey kids, in case you were wondering, the Mary Worth Estelle Gets Grifted storyline is still happening this week, and presumably will be until the heat death of the universe. Today I want to point out that if you knew Wilbur, and if Mary called you up and said “I have some news about Wilbur…“, you’d definitely assume it was bad news, right? Like he had cried himself to death, or went on a tour of the mayonnaise factor and “accidentally” got locked into the mayonnaise factory overnight and just when he was going to enjoy a single spoonful of mayonnaise fresh from the vat he slipped (on mayonnaise) and suffered massive head trauma? I guess Dr. Jeff is in for a pleasant (?) surprise.

Judge Parker, 6/18/19

Over in Judge Parker, the traditional social hierarchy is all upside down: Judge Parker Senior is super duper going to jail, but Marie, who you might recall decided to quit her job as the Spencer-Driver maidservant and take her chances in the outside world despite the gangsters who want her dead, is living her best life, in case you were worried about her! This time she’s relaxing at a tropical resort with a hunk who won’t fake his death, probably.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/18/19

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, drunk with power now that it got other syndicated newspaper strips to acknowledge its existence for a single day, is returning to a task it attempted and failed at back in 2014: making Bizzy Buzz Buzz, the manic Smif niece who loves to clean, happen. Folks, I gotta tell ya: Bizzy Buzz Buzz is not gonna happen!

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Mary Worth, 6/13/19

This is a full time Wilbur/Estelle (Wilbstelle? Estbur?) fanblog now and you can just deal with it. Today I am mesmerized by the massive burger looming in the background, which I guess is an image on the window of Delicious Grill(e?) but looks like some kind of hovering alien being, whose research on Earth determined that hamburgers were plentiful and therefore an inconspicuous form to take, beaming love rays into Wilbur and Estelle’s brains and convincing them to head back to Estelle’s apartment for piano playing and sex, for whatever inscrutable reason (presumably the alien’s spacecraft is powered by the energy produced when two middle-aged people settle for one another).

Dennis the Menace, 6/13/19

I’m not even going to bother assessing Dennis’s menacing level here, and instead I’m just going to point out the truly bizarre arrangement of furniture in the Mitchells’ living room. Like, did Henry or Alice deliberately move one of the chairs so that they could sit angrily near each other like this? Or is this the permanent arrangement, acknowledging that their amity could shatter into mutual animus at any moment, but their fundamental attraction precludes either of them from just storming out of the room?

Six Chix, 6/13/19

Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that the new owner of your favorite bakery is extremely cheap — he’s skimping on the lemon bars so that it’s like eating all dough and no filling; you order them all the time and you can tell. Sure, you could call a friend on the phone to tell them about it, and that has its satisfaction. But what if you had a syndicate newspaper comic? Then you could tell thousands of people all over the country your tale of woe! Admittedly, that story wouldn’t contain a “joke” per se, but years doing a syndicated newspaper comic will have taught you that if this was once a reason to stop a comic strip from being published, it no longer is and hasn’t been for some time.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/13/19

Check out Rex’s thinkin’ face in that last panel. “Wait, you can just pay people to go away? Because I’ve got plenty of money and I don’t like people very much. This could really work out for me!”

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Mary Worth, 6/12/19

“Hmm, I think I’ll have this dish they call the ‘Hunky Tech Millionaire.’ That’s not a phrase that has any particularly unpleasant associations for you, is it?”

Hi and Lois, 6/12/19

Bad news, Trixie! The very slim chance that this strip was going to pivot to a For Better Or For Worse-style aging in real-time drama vanished long ago. Your audience is 100% nostalgics now, and those nostalgics only want you to be a baby, so you’re going to be a baby … forever.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/12/19

You know, sometimes the point of this blog is for me to have an outlet for my creativity and analysis using the daily newspaper comics as a prompt, but sometimes the point is that I shouldn’t have to suffer alone, and today is one of those days when we tip towards the latter. If I have to know that the theme of today’s Funky Winkerbean is “the Funky Winkerbean characters are horny,” then so do you, by god.