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Mary Worth, 3/12/19

Oh, hey, if you’re wondering where the Estelle/Arthur Z (or, more accurately, Estelle/team of catfishers hanging out in a Kuala Lumpur cybercafe operating the “Arthur Z” SilverDaters account) is at, it’s reached “quoting e e cummings over the phone,” and Estelle is over the moon! The main question I have is if they’ve somehow tricked her into calling into a phone number she has to pay them for, or if they’re doing this toll-free via Skype or whatever and they’re keeping their powder dry for the moment when “Arthur Z” loses his wallet and needs a five-figure sum wired to a Malaysian Western Union office, stat.

Mark Trail, 3/12/19

Meanwhile, in Mark Trail, Cherry’s dad just got a phone call letting him know his old friend died, which means we have six to fifteen weeks of a “Doc confronts his own mortality!” adventure ahead of us. Not sure how they’re going to work Mark blowing up a boat into this but I’m confident they’ll find a way.

Beetle Bailey, 3/12/19

The Wikipedia list of Beetle Bailey supporting characters is invaluable to a scholar of the Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC oeuvre such as myself, but I have problems with some of its takes on the players’ personalities. For instance, Dr. Bonkus (NO REALLY HIS NAME IS “DR. BONKUS”) is described as “Camp Swampy’s loopy staff psychiatrist, whose own sanity is questionable,” but in all the time I’ve been reading the strip he’s never been anything other than a long-suffering straight man to everyone else’s antics. I kind of enjoy the fact that today’s strip takes place in two entirely different locations; it would have been a little shticky if Rocky had pulled out his guitar and delivered this punchline in mid-session, but as it is we can imagine that he just said “Great!” and got off the couch and left without further explanation, leaving Dr. Bonkus behind to sigh heavily and contemplate, not for the first time, just how much he really helps his patients.

The Phantom, 3/12/19

You’d think that when you’ve been raised from birth to be the 21st in a lineal series of mysterious jungle superheroes, you wouldn’t make rookie secret identity mistakes along the lines of “me … uh, I mean, not me, my close personal friend, the hero, who isn’t me at all, heheheheheh [nervous laughter gradually fades out]”

Six Chix, 3/12/19

Congrats to Six Chix for taking its weird foot thing to the next level … indeed, to the highest possible level. Who wouldn’t want to worship a God with such magnificent toes? Truly we are blessed to be formed in His image, foot-wise.

Pluggers, 3/12/19

Ha ha, did you guys know that bears are carnivores and kangaroos are herbivores? I sure hope plugger diner seats are pleather or some other material that’s easy to hose the blood and viscera off of!

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Gil Thorp, 9/6/19

There’s an old joke/parable about a guy who’s trapped on his roof during a flood. As the waters rose, not once, not twice, but three times rescue boats motored by, but each time the man refused help, saying, “The Lord will provide.” Eventually, the waters rose up over the roof and he drowned, then found himself face-to-face with the Almighty. “I don’t understand!” he said. “You said you would provide for me in times of trouble!” And God replied, “Hey, I sent three boats.”

My point here is that just about every Gil Thorp plot involves Gil and/or his student-athletes and/or the Milford athletic department getting into a big mess, throughout which Gil just smirks smugly and reassures everyone that everything will work out for the best, and it usually does, thanks either to someone else doing most of the work or pure dumb luck. So you could see why Gil is serenely confident at this point that the Lord, or whatever the philosophical equivalent of an omnipotent deity is for a syndicated comic strip, is working tirelessly to rearrange reality in his favor. Unfortunately, when other people who believe they have free will turn out to be part of the Lord’s inscrutable plan, you can see how they might start to feel a little cranky and unappreciated after a while! Anyway, I hope this ends with Marty trying to rent B/Robby’s billboards to say more mean things about Gil, then finding out how much that costs, then just resorting to using WDIG’s photocopier to make a bunch of signs about how Gil is a jerk, which he’ll tape up on utility poles all over town.

Mary Worth, 9/6/19

Oh, man, communicating with a potential beau outside the internal SilverDaters messaging system is not recommended, both because it reduces the time-on-site metric SilverDaters uses to quantify customer engagement and because it reveals your real name and email address, opening you up to identity theft or whatever. I’m guessing that this latter route is where this storyline is going; this is going to make it awkward that Mary herself encouraged this online dating thing, since the final lesson will be that, once again, the internet is only good for desperate loners who deserve all the suffering they get. To counteract this negativity in advance, I would like to praise the SilverDaters user experience engineers who realized that an extra large font would be best for their targeted customer demographic.

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Mary Worth, 3/4/19

After Estelle’s cavalcade of awful no-good dates, I was beginning to think that maybe Silverdater profiles just didn’t have pictures? You know, because so many old people believe that cameras capture and imprison your soul or whatever. But, nope, I guess she looked at all those other dudes and said “sure,” or, conversely, was bamboozled by their misleading photos and yet still believes “Arthur Z” is the silver fox she’s seeing on her off-brand tablet. Anyway, “Arthur Z”: not real, right? That’s a model from a denture catalogue badly photoshopped onto a picture downloaded from the Wikipedia article for Tahiti? And “Arthur”’s gonna ask for money, via an international wire transfer? I’m excited!

Gil Thorp, 3/4/19

Hey, can we talk about Marty’s boots? Specifically: what the heck is the deal with Marty’s boots? I mean, I don’t doubt Marty Moon is a man who allows himself the little boost you get from a subtly raised heel, but, like, how far up the leg do they go? Are they cowboy boots? Shiny black leather cowboy boots? Marty has vanquished B/Robby and it’s only Monday, so presumably he’ll spend the rest of the week gloating, possibly while spinning around gleefully in his chair, so maybe we’ll get to see some different angles on them.

Marvin, 3/4/19

Honestly, I don’t think it’s possible for Marvin to be more on-brand than this strip, in which the title character’s exhausted mother stares at her son, eyes heavy-lidded, trying to convince him that, actually, someday he’ll enjoy shitting in a toilet instead of his pants, while he glares back at her in open defiance.

Dennis the Menace, 3/4/19

Truly excellent menacing today, Dennis. Nostalgia is a trap! Wallowing the the idealized “good old days” blinds you to the true scope of history and cuts you off from progress!

Pluggers, 3/4/19

See, Pluggers gets it! (The whole point of Pluggers is that when you relate to one of the panels, that’s how you know you’re dying, right?)