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Mark Trail, 5/5/18

Is it just me or has this “Rusty woos a young lady” plotline suddenly transformed Mark’s ward from his usual form as a hideous boy-thing into a handsome lad with piercing blue eyes? We all know that we can’t just change our appearance at a whim, that would be absurd, so I have to assume that we’re seeing Rusty’s own mental image of himself at this precise moment, influenced by some combination of close proximity to a girl who isn’t visibly recoiling from him in horror and the lower oxygen levels at high altitude.

Mary Worth, 5/5/18

Good lord! Wilbur’s so far gone that he’s failed to adequately oil up his combover, leaving it to blow willy-nilly in the ocean breeze! Just give him a firm shove over the cliff, Mary; if he were in his right mind, he would much prefer death to a life like … this.

Crankshaft, 5/5/18

Crankshaft dropped so many pills under the fridge that he brought in the cops and a drug-sniffing dog to find them, ha ha! In other news, Centerville has a serious drug problem in its high school.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/5/18

“Baby rabies” is the kind of rabies you get when you’re bitten by a rabid baby. It’s the worst kind of rabies there is and as a medical professional Rex should not be joking about it!

Family Circus, 5/5/18

Aww, isn’t that cute! The car is Jeffy’s cloth mother!

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Hagar the Horrible, 5/4/18

I really have to question Hagar’s theatrical eye-roll in the final panel here. Lucky Eddie is often depicted in this strip as too soft to be a Viking warrior, but today, in failing to grasp a metaphor, he seems to understand a deeper truth: the places where we are most needy and open to love are also the spots where we’re the most vulnerable. He also knows that the heart and lungs are protected by the ribcage and sternum, but the belly is exposed to attack. Look for the trail of agonized gut-shot foot soldiers writing in agony as Hagar’s band makes its way inland looking for monasteries to plunder!

Gil Thorp, 5/4/18

Ahhh, the Milford Trumpet, the school newspaper you might remember from Gil Thorp plotlines like the one where a reporter suppressed the information that one of his athlete pals had a dangerous heart condition, and also the one where it seemed like an athlete had beat up his girlfriend but then it turned out he hadn’t, and then probably some others that I can’t remember at the moment. Anyhoo, it seems that the Trumpet staff assumes that, like me, most of the student body at Milford has forgotten that Barry Bader still goes there, so they’re commissioning a hard-hitting investigative piece: “Barry Bader: Does He Still Go Here, And Is He Still An Asshole?”

Mary Worth, 5/4/18

I think we can be … reasonably sure Wilbur hasn’t hurled himself off a cliff in a paroxysm of drunken despair, right? Right? Surely Mary would look just as overwhelmed as she does in panel two upon discovering, say, Wilbur loudly singing country music tunes into a grassy puddle of his own sick. PLEASE DO NOT KILL WILBUR, MARY WORTH CREATIVE TEAM, I ENJOY HIS SUFFERING TOO MUCH

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The Phantom, 4/29/18

This Phantom Sunday plot, involving our hero breaking a prison snitch out Bangalla’s most hellish jail temporarily for crime-fighting purposes, has been happening since at least last October, and I’m definitely not going bring you up to date on everything that’s happened in it, because if it were actually interesting I probably would’ve talked about it here already, right? Mostly I wanted to point out that our jailbird’s faltering attempt to find common ground with the Phantom makes the hero recoil in disgust and think about his loving, supportive childhood where a man dressed in a purple gimp suit who never even let his own children see his face taught him to kill.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/28/18

Oh, right, Heather, last seen having succeeded in her plan to seduce her dying, demented husband, or at least procure some of his seed. Well, the baby’s born and the husband is dead, and now she’s going to have to deal with both the grief and her stepson Hugh, who failed to come to his father’s deathbed, probably because his father never liked him and he and Heather conspired to keep Hugh from taking control of the family company not once but twice. The new baby is named “Phoenix,” presumably to summon the image of a bird rising from its own ashes, which will help Heather make the case to the board of Avery International that the infant is in fact the reincarnated soul of Milton and therefore technically the company CEO.

Mary Worth, 4/28/18

I know it’s been a few days since we checked in with Wilbur, so here’s the update: Wilbur’s still depressed, and now he’s turning to drink. It’s sad that he has this whole liquor cabinet, including a bottle of decent scotch, and nobody to share it with. What about his neighbors? What about Ian? What do you think is keeping Wilbur from inviting Ian over and enjoying a pleasant nightcap? Probably the fact that they don’t really care for each other because they’re both pretty unlikeable, I imagine.