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Gil Thorp, 4/11/18

Well, it was bound to happen: the Social Justice Teens are feeling kind of bad about defeating Marty by goading him into cussing on-air. You’d think they’d take the attitude of “Yay, the sports radio guy who literally nobody liked even before we found out he was a racist isn’t going to be saying rude things about our friends on-air anymore!” But these kids sense, at the periphery of their minds, that they are in fact the current protagonists in an ongoing narrative; and while in real life we actually enjoy getting what we want, within a story a protagonist without an antagonist is dull and lifeless, and they know it.

Mary Worth, 4/11/18

Mary Worth, obviously, doesn’t feel itself restricted by such conventional narrative niceties. Sure, the current storyline of Wilbur’s mid-grade ennui appears to lack dramatic tension, drifting as it is from a little shower singin’ to some light shoe purchasing. But in fact the true interest to the reader is the nature of the story itself: is something actually going to happen one of these days? Or when we picture the future, should we imagine Wilbur thought-ballooning while shopping at various chain stores, forever?

Family Circus, 4/11/18

Generally speaking the circumstances in which you’d eat off a tray like this are that you’re eating dinner in front of the TV, which is literally every child’s fondest wish, so it seems weird that Billy is so outraged here. The prissy face really sells it, though. “Mother, not only are we watching televised entertainment rather than earnestly discussing our day over dinner, but the lack of a table means that there are no arbitrary rules of etiquette to enforce! This is sheer anarchy! Also, I dropped a lot of whatever this green goop is on the rug.”

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/10/18

It’s true, Jughaid: in the world most of us take for granted, the individual has been empowered by civil society and the modern state, which has a direct relationship with its citizens. But you live in Hootin’ Holler, where those institutions are barely perceptible, and instead everyone’s lives are circumscribed by bonds of blood, with extended families being the primary forms of identification and arbiters of power. It’s not clear whether Snuffy’s nephew made friends with someone from a hostile clan, wandered into hostile territory, or violated some other taboo, but swift Smif justice has descended upon him and reminded him that his own desires ought to be subordinated to the agenda of his kinship group.

Mary Worth, 4/10/18

Congratulations to panel two of Mary Worth for offering the most incredibly specific foot fetish imagery on the Internet. Boy, it’s really too bad you can’t smell something through your web browser, huh?

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/7/18

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen exactly one episode of the 1967 Dragnet revival in my life, but its plot is burned into my brain. Friday and Gannon try to bust a ring of hippie drug freaks, with one of said freaks, a bearded intellectual who thought his friends had “gone too far,” serving as an informant. They do manage to make the arrests, but not before one hippie couple’s two-year-old daughter tragically drowns in the bathtub, because her parents were neglecting her while high on [dramatic music sting] MARIJUANA. Then, at the end of the show, the informant shows up at police HQ and he’s gotten a haircut and shaved his beard and is wearing a suit, and he announces that he still holds to his ideals but is going to get a job as a journalist and work to change the system from the inside. That’s all I can think about looking at Justin here. Sure, it took a terrible disease and a mother so paranoid about doctors that it’s almost certainly a diagnosable disorder, but the important thing is that his hair isn’t hanging over his god-damned ears anymore.

Mary Worth, 4/7/18

I would of course never deny you the pleasure of seeing Wilbur singing along with Willie Nelson in the shower, but I also want to make sure you realize that that shampoo ad from earlier this week finally roused him from his depressed squalor and convinced him to, for the first time in presumably days or perhaps even weeks, bathe.

Mark Trail, 4/7/18

I love that Marlin looks more outraged by this development than anything else. “He’s going to ram the jeep! The very jeep I’m sitting in! Why, the nerve!”