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Mary Worth, 2/29/24

Yes, blah blah blah, Toby and Mary are still going on and on about Keith’s virtues (as a singer and a [squints] farrier?) and unorthodox but still Mary Worth Approved™ family situations, but what I really needed to let you know about is that Mary is dishing up her latest and greatest disgusting slop recipe to Toby, her least discriminating neighbor. Mmm mmm, it’s brownish-grey, it’s viscous, it’s steaming hot, and it’s full of … pebbles? peanut M&Ms? Whatever, Toby’s had so many nose jobs her senses of smell and taste are pretty much kaput, and Mary doesn’t want to just throw this concoction out, because it might get loose and start crawling around and smothering people.

Dennis the Menace, 2/29/24

I’ve given it some thought, and I’ve decided that “No punishment can hurt me, no prison can truly cage me … as long as I can construct my mind palace with the power of pure memory and imagination” isn’t so much “menacing” as “kind of ominous.” I think that’s an important distinction!

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/26/24

Every once in a while, the Rex Morgan, M.D., creative team remembers the “M.D.” part of the strip title and realizes they’re supposed to be doing medical or medical-adjacent storylines. Unfortunately, they hate that, so they make them as boring as possible to ensure that we don’t demand more of them. Healing is mostly sitting around and not doing anything, if you think about it, and is that what you want to read about in a comics strip? When you could be getting more juicy gossip about what sort of drama goes on within the roots country community? I think not.

Marvin, 2/26/24

Every once in a while, the Marvin creative team remembers that they do a daily strip where the primary joke is that the main character, a baby with adult-level cognition, pisses and shits himself constantly, and enjoys it, and worry that they might be put in jail for their many crimes, so they have to do an even more off-putting strip so that a few days later, when newspapers print a strip where a Marvin grins smugly after voiding his bowels into his diaper and everyone around him recoils in disgust, the average reader thinks, “Well, at least this one isn’t about a dog contemplating a human’s genitals” rather than picking up the phone and dialing 911.

Mary Worth, 2/26/24

“It seems he’s a bachelor no more … so amazing that he’s managed to have a 20-year-old daughter in a just a few weeks!” Toby is just 100% zooted to the gills.

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Family Circus, 2/24/24

The Family Circus was originally drawn by Bil Keane, with the characters all being thinly veiled versions of him and his real family, and the Bil analogue character in the strip also worked as a cartoonist; the narrative layers only got more tangled when real-life Jeffy took over, making the occasional guest stints by “Billy, age 7” a true semiotic swamp: originally these panels were Bil pretending to be his son pretending to be him, and now they’re Jeff pretending to be his brother pretending to be their father. Anyway, here’s today panel, which features said father vividly writhing on the floor in agony!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/24/24

I guess it’s probably good that soap opera comics, a form of entertainment primarily enjoyed by the elderly and infirm, are increasingly targeting those readers with PSA-style messages about how they need to have a plan for the inevitable upcoming incident when they will have fallen and won’t be able get up, but in their shoes I personally would find it a little insulting. Dagnabbit, these older folks get plenty of bad news in the rest of the paper! When they turn to Rex Morgan, M.D., they want to see our heroes get a fat check or prance around in their underwear for a bit. They very much do not want to stare into the wizened face of their own mortality, in the form of Aunt Tildy and the “Count” here.

Mary Worth, 2/24/24

God I love this strip. Recent events have sent Keith into turmoil, but Mary? Mary is doing great. Thriving, even. Walking alone around the Charterstone grounds, serenely meditating on some of her favorite zero-content aphorisms. Truly living her best life.