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Mary Worth, 5/16/16

You’d think you that once you’ve graduated from high school and gone to college, you’re done with being bullied, you know? But nope, poor Dawn is just over here relaxing under a tree, probably texting fun memes back and forth with her dad or something, and then BAM! Up comes the three meanest girls at UC Santa Royale, ready to tear Dawn to pieces (emotionally). And while the “PC police” would have you believe that bullying is never justified, I think that when you’re a college-age young woman and you try to date your professor and he’s this dude, with this mustache, a certain amount of social opprobrium is fully justified.

Gil Thorp, 5/16/16

Ah, a solid Gil Thorp trope we haven’t seen in a while: “One of the Mudlarks is completely insufferable and everyone hates him but he gets redeemed, somehow.” They did with Andrew Gregory, who was a terrible braggart but then it turned out his parents had abandoned him and his siblings and Marty Moon had to pretend to be his dad so Social Services didn’t put them in a foster home. Anyway, Barry “Darth” Bader, not anywhere emo enough to be graced by the more up-to-date “Kylo” nickname, is really going to test our ability to eventually feel affection, or at least a frisson of empathy, for him.

Judge Parker, 5/16/16

Haha, Abbey has to get back to … what, exactly? Her non-job? Her sham marriage? Her horse farm, where all the actual horse farming is carried out by her absurdly uniformed underlings? I mean, I get it; she’s already put in about twice as much time and energy today on Neddy’s dumb factory and Rocky and Godiva’s sexual banter as I’d want to over the course of my entire life. The real power move is going to be if she just refuses to look up from her phone as she strolls away.

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Crankshaft, 5/14/16

I sort of thought I was joking earlier this week but no, it turns out they really are killing off Rose! They’ve been doing this arts-y jumping back and forth over two weeks or so of strip time, and I suppose it’s possible this funeral scene is going to be a dumb fakeout, but it sure does seem like she’s dead (of cancer, natch). You have to almost admire the perversity of today’s strip, in which the grim punchline is put into the first panel and then the second panel is just a son staring at his hated mother, waiting for her to die.

Hagar the Horrible, 5/14/16

Meanwhile, Hagar the Horrible shows you how to land a really solid “ha ha, it’s funny because he’s old and dying” joke.

Family Circus, 5/14/16

As near as we can tell, most human societies have believed that the soul lives on after death in some form for all of history. What if, ironically, this only became reality once we mastered the art of photography? In the 19th century, processes beyond our ken began tying the ghostly echoes of our loved ones to the visual representations we produced. The more pictures we took, the stronger the undead entities became. And now that we store thousands and thousands of perfect digital images … in the cloud … the consequences will be too terrible to imagine.

Mary Worth, 5/14/16

People may doubt Ian and Toby as a couple, but I think it’s adorable how she always looks for a way to slip her wedding vows into daily conversation!

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Hello, faithful readers! I am back in the saddle and better than ever. I had a wonderful if extremely exhausting time on my book tour. Attendance really blew right past my expectations, and I might try to do some west coast dates later this year, so watch this space. I got to meet many of you, including a young man in Buffalo who asked me to autograph a printed out joke from my blog where I made fun of Archie! I was very, very thrilled to do this.

Anyway! Huge thanks to everyone who contributed during the fundraiser — you’ll be getting personalized thank yous soon, along with queries for info on where to send your tote bag, if you want one. And huge thanks to the unflappable Uncle Lumpy, who got to experience the most shocking moment in recent Mary Worth history, and who was hilarious all week. As Uncle Lumpy noted, though, Mary Worth’s new artistic regime is only working on Sunday strips for now, so in today’s strip, the world is back in the configuration that we all know and understand.

Mary Worth, 5/9/16

I love how Cathy has managed to get all the way up to touching distance in the middle of this vast expanse of concrete and Dawn is only now noticing her. Presumably her mind is far, far away, thinking about Harlan bending over in his short yoga shorts and how she is definitely 100% only friends with him, the sort of friendship that’s so all-consuming that you don’t have time for non-Harlan friends, because what use are non-Harlan friends, really?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/9/16

In other soap strip personnel news, as promised Rex Morgan, M.D., artist Terry Beatty is now Rex Morgan, M.D., artist and writer Terry Beatty. And the first thing happening under the new regime is that Rex and June are definitely not buying this fusty old money pit, which is great news for lovelorn pinheads. I love Rex’s genuinely thoughtful face in panel three. “No three-prong plugs? But … how will I power the laptop I use to ignore you?”

Crankshaft, 5/9/16

Haha, looks like Rose, the character introduced to make sure that Ed Crankshaft wasn’t the least likable person in the comic strip named after him, is about to die! It’s zany punchlines like this one that really make Crankshaft the “fun” Funkyverse strip.

Pluggers, 5/9/16

You know, I’m pretty mean to the pluggers in Pluggers, but if you’re not overwhelmed by terrible empathy looking at this man-dog’s sad facial expression as he contemplates the amount of water he needs to choke down all the pills keeping him alive, you’re some kind of monster.