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Mary Worth, 9/4/16

One of the low-key best aspects of the Tommy the Tweaker Mary Worth stories is the emotionally complex and slightly co-dependent relationship between Beedle mère et fils. Sure, Tommy has let Iris down, again and again, but deep down in his heart he doesn’t want to. Obviously it’s very embarrassing for Tommy to be busted in front of his mom, partly because now she knows he’s a drug addict. But I bet that what hurts him most is that in her eyes he’s now an incompetent pharmacy-shopper. Like, why couldn’t she have seen all the times he successfully pulled this off, you know? Maybe she would’ve been proud of him, even!

Panel from The Lockhorns, 9/4/16

It’s always fascinated me that the Lockhorns takes advantage of the increased space the Sunday comics provides by printing six unrelated one-panel Lockhorns gags. That’s a lot of content! And as someone who has to produce a lot of content on the regular, I know that sometimes the well just goes dry on your usual shtick, man. That’s why I totally respect today’s Lockhorns, which provided five gags about the usual marital hellscape and one that’s just “what’s the deal with deep-dish pizza, amirght everyone?”

Panels from Crock, 9/4/16

I’m from Buffalo, NY, where Buffalo wings were invented (more than a decade after the notorious Jessica Simpson “I don’t eat Buffalo” incident, some people still need this explained to them), and, fun fact: in Buffalo we don’t call them “Buffalo wings”! We call them “chicken wings,” or just “wings.” So I guess I’m not surprised that people who are actually in the French Foreign Legion don’t call it “Legionnaires’ disease.”

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Mary Worth, 8/28/16

Sorry I’ve sort of let coverage of the latest Tommy the Substance Abuser arc slip a little bit; that’s because it’s been less “Tommy lies around shirtless” and more “Sad Iris gets pie and advice from Mary.” And Mary’s advice is this: have you considered mothering your child? If he’s screwing up, or falling into a downward spiral of addiction, is it possible that it’s something you did, or failed to do? Mary really is a good advice columnist. Amateurs try to shame women who are full-time students or workers for neglecting their minor children; it takes a true master to try that on someone who’s kid is, like, 28 years old, at minimum.

The Phantom, 8/28/16

The Phantom runs separate storylines during the week and on Sunday, and the current Sunday plot, which I haven’t discussed here, involves the intertwined Chicago and Chinese mobs, representatives of whom arrived in Bangalla via plane crash. Someone over at Phantom central seems to have a hate-on for the People’s Republic of China for some reason, maybe because of their failure to uphold human rights! [gets to last panel of today’s strip, shifts in chair uncomfortably]

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/28/16

The parson is right to be worried! One more accidental pregnancy this weekend, and he’s in danger of infringing on the intellectual property of Polygram Filmed Entertainment, and those guys play rough.

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Mark Trail, 8/18/16

Oh say, it looks like this new Mark Trail storyline isn’t going to be about whales after all! It’s going to be about ants, specifically invasive fire ants, who presumably set up a nest in the corpses of this amorous couple two years ago and have now evolved into unstoppable killers. Anyway, today’s panel two is definitely the best ever instance of Mark keeping a straight face while a government bureaucrat spells out an entire URL over the phone for some reason. While there really isn’t room in the panel to structure the word balloons this way, I like to think that the actual dialogue is something like this:

“That’s doubleyou doubleyou doubleyou dot”

“Abbey–”

“hungry pests dot com”

“Abbey, this all–”

“slash the dash threat”

[a pause]

“This all sounds like–”

“slash imported dash fire dash…”

Gil Thorp, 8/18/16

Marty Moon runs a radio show entirely dedicated to high school sports (and, apparently, the legal ramifications of the deaths of high school athletes). But it’s a well known fact that Marty is “out of touch” with the kids who should be making up the bulk of his audience. Today we learn that he doesn’t even have an app that teens can download to their beloved smartphones to get push notifications about the news they care about, along with messages from Marty’s sponsors and corporate partners! No, they’re getting texts from their parents about stuff Marty’s saying on the radio, which strikes me as very difficult to monetize.

Dick Tracy, 8/18/16

“I mean, why would I shoot my food, right? I could, I guess. Like if I shot my food a bunch of times, that’d break it up into bite-sized pieces. But that seems like way more work than it’s worth. Still, you know, for fighting and stuff, I think guns are the way to go.”

Mary Worth, 8/18/16

Ugh, Tommy, all the street hustlers in My Own Private Idaho did cool drugs, like heroin. You get your pills from the damn CVS, Tommy. That’s not cool at all.