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Spider-Man, 6/29/16

This Spider-Man Doctor Strange storyline has been going on for, what, four months now, Jesus Christ, and it’s been super boring for like the last six weeks at least, and not even boring in, like, a fun way. Anyway, let’s hope that today’s dramatic moment, in which Spider-Man picks a thing up off the ground and gives it to some other dude who actually knows how to use it, represents the climax to this storyline and we’ll move on to something else! Or maybe not. Maybe they’ll drag this thing out until the Doctor Strange movie comes out in [checks date on Google] November? Are you kidding me?

Mary Worth, 6/29/16

Mary Worth, meanwhile, turns boredom into a delicate, mesmerizing art form. Mary’s spent three days typing a banal response to a letter to Wilbur’s advice column! Three days! Typing! Yet I can’t take my eyes away, as her fingers dance delicately across the least ergonomic keyboard ever made. This is how it’s done, Spider-Man. This is how it’s done.

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Mary Worth, 6/26/16

Oh thank goodness, the new Sunday Mary Worth team heeded my warnings and and restored Wilbur’s glorious combover! His arms are still distressingly bare, but we’ll take today’s wispy strands of head hair as progress. Who knows, maybe he’s been waxing his arms, in the misguided belief that the Japanese will find his less off-putting if he isn’t in his usual bear-like state!

Panels from Hi and Lois, 6/26/16

Haha, nice try getting teens to like your strip with relatable email jokes, Hi and Lois! No teen alive would be this excited about getting an email. They’d recoil in horror and confusion, as if you tried to hand them a telegram. No, kids today want to get, uh, Snapchats, or … maybe YikYaks? Is that a thing? YikYaks? Look, I may not know what teens like, but I know what they don’t like, and what they don’t like is email.

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Mary Worth, 6/22/16

I don’t want to engage in any stereotyping, but my understanding is that Japan is a more reserved and stoic culture than the United States. Thus, I would have to assume that those in Japan who survived the terrible tragedies of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident would like few things less than to have some American lunge at them in sympathy, Wilbur style, and try to get them to emote for “I Shouldn’t Be Alive!”, his terrible and widely syndicated newspaper column. Anyway, pretty much all you need to know about Mary Worth is that our upcoming storyline is much less likely to be “Wilbur rambles around Japan re-traumatizing earthquake victims” and more likely to be “Mary replies to someone who wrote into a newspaper advice column.”

Family Circus, 6/22/16

The “Billy subs for his dad on Fathers Day” bit has a long and storied history in the Family Circus, but does it usually last an entire week? Anyway, the layers of metafiction in these exercises are always exhausting — like, grown-up Jeff Keane is pretending to be the 7-year-old version of his real-life brother subbing for their father, who died in 2011 — and this strip just adds some messed up family dynamics to the mix. “No, it was Billy who made a crude fat joke about your child-self, Dolly! Billy, age 7!”

Phantom, 6/22/16

Looks like Kit Jr. (or Kit XXIII, I guess) will be spending the next four years in Tibet, cut off from his home and family. So at his goodbye party, he’s enjoying the sort of Bangallan treat he’ll be missing: a raw unpeeled potato, fresh from the bowl!