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Panel from Mary Worth, 4/10/16

Guys, when we started on this journey together with Harlan Jones, the Sensual, Bendy, Spiritually Advanced Substitute Art History Professor, I made a joke about how eventually he would make a pass at Dawn. I did this not because I thought it was going to happen, but because I thought it wasn’t. Coming up with absurd counterfactuals for the soap opera strips is basically like at least 75% of why this blog exists, and I figured a forbidden student-professor romance and/or a faculty member making a gross sexual advance on one of his students would be a little too hot for Mary Worth. It’s starting to look like I was wrong, though! It’s starting to look like the most unlikely seduction in human history — a guy who looks like the guy in a 1950s movie whose girlfriend Cary Grant steals gives a half-assed art history lecture about how awesome Leonardo da Vinci was instead of actually talking about art history, inspiring his class’s drippiest student to come talk to him, and then he shifts the topic to yoga, and then she comes and does one yoga class with him, and then she gets invited to a private yoga session at his house, and then probably sex — is about to happen. God have mercy on us all.

Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/10/16

The desperately impoverished residents of Hootin’ Holler are of course almost completely cut off from the mainstream American economy, but they keep in tenuous touch with the outside world via radio and thus have an extremely tenuous idea of what it’s like out there, with heartbreaking results.

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Dennis the Menace, 4/8/16

I’m really enjoying this young couple’s facial expressions as Dennis regales them with tales of his family’s casual and profitable lies. The woman seems flabbergasted, horrified to learn that the Mitchells have taught their child that it’s OK to speak untruths, as long as you can save a little money by doing so. The man, however, is steeped in ennui, as if this is totally in line with what he knows about the deceitful nature of humanity. “Mmm, the child doesn’t seem to even resist spinning this web of falsehoods, and why should he? People need to be taught to be good, and we as a society haven’t been teaching them very well for a very long time.”

Funky Winkerbean, 4/8/16

Cliff Anger’s name is very appropriate — not because of the cliffhangers that were the most prominent features of the Starbuck Jones serials in which he starred, but rather because he’s angry, so very, very angry, about a world that passed him by and the young people who now inhabit it. Fun! Anyway, I dearly hope those ellipses in his word balloon in the final panel represent significantly long pauses. “I … D … I know you know what’s coming next but you’re still gonna have to wait around for me to finish, you little fucks … L …”

Judge Parker, 4/8/16

Oh hey everybody, the non-old-people-sweatshop plot in Judge Parker just resolved itself off-panel, in case you were worried! Rocky! You gotta love that guy, if by “love” you mean “worry about him constantly, in ways that you may or may not be paid to do!”

Mary Worth, 4/8/16

Harlan Jones’s defense before the ethics board will be an intriguing one. “But I made sure to keep my conversation with the undergraduates extremely stilted and square! How could I have possibly known she’d find the phrase ‘This is an informal college atmosphere, and I’m an informal guy’ erotic?”

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Crock, 4/6/16

Ha ha, “downloading” is definitely a word related to computers in some way, and “the recycle bin” is definitely part of the desktop metaphor used in the popular Windows operating system! “Download that to the old recycle bin,” that’s what the kids say, when they’re surfing on their PCs and such. Hilarious! In other news, due to the inexorable march of mechanical efficiency, this domesticated camel is no longer needed by its human masters, and so it will be released into the wild to inepty fend for itself, or possibly just killed so its carcass can be processed for a number of industrial uses.

Judge Parker, 4/6/16

Speaking of the inexorable march of efficiency, I’m very excited to hear that Neddy’s half-baked plan to out-compete Chinese labor by extracting the last few useful labor-hours out of government-subsidized old people has now become a “movement.” And look in that gleam in Foster Chubb’s eyes! This is a man who thought he could grift the Spencer-Parkers with comically stagy wound dressings, so sure, he’s 100% on board with this “groundswell of support” that will somehow defeat basic economics.

Six Chix, 4/6/16

Definitely if I had died, and my immortal soul had been misplaced in some mysterious subvoid for an uncountable age, and then I was yanked out of that only to be shepherded into an even more unknowable afterlife, that’s the dazed, terrified expression I’d have on my face.

Hi and Lois, 4/6/16

Hey guys, uhhhhhh, it turns out Trixie can read? This has a number of unsettling implications that I’m reasonably sure aren’t going to be pursued.

Mary Worth, 4/6/16

“I mean, I could tell after one class that Harlan Jones doesn’t know jack shit about art history, and he still got a job here, so there must be something to it!”