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Mary Worth, 10/15/17

Today’s Mary Worth is mostly a hilarious rehash of a hilarious week for the Sunday crowd, but there is one new bit of information: in the first panel in the third row, Wilbur reveals that he’s so anxious and anhedonic that he needs to be intoxicated just to experience the basic levels of enjoyment that most humans normally feel when listening to music. See, we’ve all been marveling at the improbable pairing of Wilbur and Fabiana, but unlike all of you shallow people, she’s managed to look past his dweebish exterior to really understand and appreciate his thoroughly unappealing personality.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/15/17

Not so fast, kid: the real monster here is the masses’ ignorance of the finer points of 1950s horror comics artistry, a shameful deficit in our education system that allows online forgers to flourish. Really makes you think, doesn’t it?

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Judge Parker, 10/12/17

Let’s check in to see what’s up in Judge Parker, and … oh, whoops, everyone’s miserable. All their wives are in prison, or just straight up leaving them because they were a big secret-keeper about secret grandchildren and such. How strange and awful it must be for these characters, so coddled under the Woody Wilson regime, handed checks and approbation at every turn, to endure the suffering being dished out by their new Dark Lord and Master, Ces Marciuliano, which will presumably continue until the cosmic scales of karma are realigned! Look at Judge Parker Senior frowning! Did he even know what a frown was, before? Did his cheek-flesh crack as it entered a configuration entirely new to it?

Gil Thorp, 10/12/17

OK, fine, the Gil Thorp creative team really can name a specific Ed Sheeran song. Anyway, why is Rick Soto so grimly determined to resist his destiny as a teen musical sensation? Is it because of his heavy investment in violent American-style masculinity? Does he think that bashing his brain into putty makes him more of a man than being a crooner does, despite the clear evidence that belting out tunes gets all the young ladies hot and bothered?

Mary Worth, 10/12/17

I’ve been writing this blog for more than 13 years now. Some of you have been with me almost that whole time; but some of you have only recently stumbled upon this site, and you may still be wondering “what’s this thing all about, man?” Well, let me tell you: if the sight of an exasperated Colombian shouting “Señor Wilbur, you have to move too!” at Wilbur as he stands absolutely still while leaning on his prancing, jiggling girlfriend floods your brain with the kind of dopamine rush most people associate with the deepest kind of love, or maybe cocaine, then you and I are on the same wavelength, my friend.

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Hi and Lois, 10/9/17

Fall is here, everybody, and you know what that means: comics doing jokes about leaves changing color for the fall, and those jokes being totally ignored by the syndicate colorists, who just dump a green fill into the leaves as usual, making the strip completely incoherent! Today’s Hi and Lois is even worse in that clearly somebody realized that at least some of the leaves needed to be orange, and so colored the ones falling but left the ones still on the branches a uniform green. Because leaves stay a bright green color until they’re ready to fall off a tree and then immediately turn orange when they detach, right? This reaffirms my belief that the coloring staff all work in some tropical nation with extremely low labor costs and no deciduous trees, or maybe in dank underground prison.

Crankshaft, 10/9/17

Crankshaft has basically the same problem here, except that it has that extra “Crankshaft twist,” i.e., the strip’s title character literally raging against God for His manifest failures.

Sally Forth, 10/9/17

Sally Forth at least got the memo: each leaf should be its own individual color! Unfortunately, it seems they’re working on the assumption that each leaf should be a unique color, which means the colorists quickly ran out of earth tones and had to move onto pastels. Seriously, look at those pink and blue leaves Ted is kneeling amongst. Are those … leaf-shaped marshmallows?

Funky Winkerbean, 10/9/17

In non-leaf news, we can tell that, after a decade, Les is finally moving on from his dead wife Lisa because he’s dumped the labor of organizing her memorial walk onto the local Rotary Club. Sorry, Rotary Club, dead Lisa’s ghost is going to haunt you now! I don’t make the rules!

Mary Worth, 10/9/17

You know where it’s not fall? Beautiful, tropical Colombia, where Wilbur’s hot new Colombian girlfriend is going to introduce him to the wonders of salsa! She’s already introduced him to the wonders of having a girlfriend who wears skin-tight leopard-print pants.