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Judge Parker, 1/31/18

Oh, man, I’ve dropped the ball on keeping you up to date on the doings in Judge Parker, haven’t I? Well, it seems that April busted out of prison with her dad’s help, then came to Randy’s to sweep him and Charlotte off into a life on the run with her, but he didn’t want to go, so she fled without them, after vaguely promising to be reunited with Charlotte, some day. Now we learn that as a result Randy has become a shut-in, refusing to leave his child or his home lest April come spirit her away. Far be it for me to force an emotionally devastated dad to go back to work before he’s ready, but does Randy know that the courthouse is probably the most heavily guarded structure in all of Parkerburg? He could go back to dispensing justice (presumably he’s the town’s only jurist, so suspects have been languishing in jail without trial for months while he works all this out) and Charlotte could coo adorably in the arms of the bailiff. Everybody wins!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/31/18

In keeping with this strip’s new hard-and-fast “no conflict whatsover” rule, I assume this court appearance will go off without a hitch, with Rex and June cementing their hold on little Johnny while his last living blood relatives look on with submissive adoration. But it’d be pretty great if they were just setting things up to snatch Johnny away in the most dramatic way possible, like showing up to object with an incredibly high-powered lawyer at the last minute, or possibly just bursting into the court room with a gang of former Special Forces troops to extract the grandchild from his kidnappers.

Mary Worth, 1/31/18

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a tragedy, but isn’t centered on the title character, who, like Janet Leigh in Psycho, is stabbed to death about a third of the way through the play. No, the protagonist is Brutus, a decent man whose fatal flaw is that he is all too aware of his own decency, and so he allows himself to believe it when other people convince him that only he can save the Republic, and the only way to do it is to help murder his friend. Mary of course can’t be lured into Ted’s muffin scam by riches or glory — she has a comfortable pension and is the manager of her condo complex, so what more could she want in those departments? But when she’s presented with the fact that currently most of the world’s 7 billion people will live and die without ever getting to enjoy her muffins — well, you can hardly expect her to accept that sad state of affairs, can you?

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Mary Worth, 1/27/18

Mary Worth has definitely been setting up the Great Muffin Caper for a while now, with Mary offering up her signature pastry to console the whole Weston clan, both father and daughter, in their times of trouble over the past year. The ones Dawn got last fall were ID’d as carrot muffins, but I’m not sure what the later ones we’ve been seeing are supposed to be, and there may not be a canonical in-universe answer, what with the writer, artist, and colorist all being different people, but they sure look like chocolate chip cookies, right? Which leads to the next obvious question: what if you made something that you called “muffins” but they were actually chocolate chip cookies shaped like muffins? That would be delicious and a differentiating piece of intellectual property that could definitely make you rich, once you’ve successfully farmed out production to a country with low labor costs and a relaxed attitude about what sort of preservatives you can legally put into baked goods.

Shoe, 1/27/18

A cool thing about writing a syndicated comic strip is that you can be momentarily stirred by a vaguely erotic premise that doesn’t really have a punchline to it, and then, bam! 15% of your job for the week is accounted for!

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Marvin, 1/26/18

As I’ve noted at least once in this space, there was a Sally Forth storyline in, I think, the mid-to-late ’00s when there was a flashback to Ted and Sally meeting in college and Sally is wearing a Sonic Youth t-shirt. Since I had been reading Sally Forth since I was Hillary’s age, her parents were canonically the same age as my parents, so the idea that Sally in college liked a band that was hip among my own cohort was a shattering blow to everything I held dear about my own age/hipness/relationship with adulthood/etc. But that was years ago, and I’ve long made peace with both the concept of comic-book time and my own ongoing slide into middle age, so I’m not alarmed to learn that the super-square parents of the syndicated comics’ worst baby attended a concert of a band who had a monster hit song 26 years ago, even though liking that band had been a marker of a certain avant-garde sensibility at the time, back when I was in college. Anyway, the sting is mitigated a bit by the fact that the dialogue here was obviously written by a space alien or near-sapient computer program that tried to imagine how a human would describe going to a rock concert, and came up with “screaming” (?) until your “jaw is sore” (??), which is technically correct but also profoundly off.

Mary Worth, 1/26/18

Oh, it looks like five-term Massachusetts Senator John Kerry Ted Miller’s boredom with retirement now has an outlet: turning Mary Worth into the muffin queen! You’d think that the current playing field for baked goods — dominated by massive industrial bakeries at one end and gourmet local boutique pastry shops at the other — represents a market that has pretty much shaken out, but Ted, who used to be a salesman of some indeterminate nature at one point, thinks Mary and her kitchen can produce enough lucrative muffins to make both him and her (but not, pointedly, Dr. Jeff) wealthy. Mary’s already posing for the label in the first panel!