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Shoe, 10/19/23

I’ve complained about this before, but Shoe has a long-established setting where the various bird characters get drunk and hit on one another, and it’s the fern bar, so seeing them drinking and smoking and flirting at Roz’s Diner in the middle of the day seems off to me. Since the primary audience for this strip, like all newspaper comic strips, is vaguely disgruntled baby boomers, it’s possible that this is supposed to be a commentary on the fact that everyone is “working” form home now and you can’t even enjoy a nice plate of meatloaf for lunch at your local greasy spoon without having to watch a bunch of kids who make “apps” for a living get drunk and try to have sex with each other, which is probably why they’re charging so much for the meatloaf these days. It’s also possible that the Shoe brain trust simply lost the image files for the fern bar background and they don’t feel like drawing it again.

Mary Worth, 10/19/23

I wonder if Keith is finding his ex using the same public data that led his secret daughter right to his apartment, or if he still has access to police databases that he’s wildly misusing? Either way, I’m not complaining, because it’s very funny seeing this guy with cartoonishly beefy forearms daintily typing away on a little Macbook.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/19/23

Welp, it seems our Mud/Rene kidnapping plot really did just kind of end in the middle of the week, which means we have a few days to spend on the Morgans’ incredibly boring family life, I guess? These kids sound like a real handful; they’re probably too young for the Mirakle Method, but if you stick a screen playing “Li’l Fergus” videos in front of them, they’ll be lulled into ignorable silence at least.

Beetle Bailey, 10/19/23

I think Beetle’s response here is kind of funny, as it’s fairly obvious that he’s sticking a pin in that doll and I assume Killer wants to know what he’s doing in a much bigger-picture sense. Anyway, I was going to do a whole riff about how it’s surprising that someone as lazy as Beetle was willing to put in the work to learn the cultural and spiritual practices of the voudou religion, but it turns out that so-called “voodoo dolls” aren’t used by practitioners of voudou in either Haiti or Louisiana, so I guess his laziness is still in full effect. I’m impressed that he somehow got a really accurate Sarge doll, though.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/15/23

So the exciting (?) Mud/Rene kidnapping plot is over (??), and I gotta say probably the perfect sum up to any given Rex Morgan, M.D., storyline is “What did you make of that?” “Hard to say.”

Pluggers, 10/15/23

Sometimes Pluggers panels can pack in a lot of sociopolitical psychodrama, but despite the wordy caption, I’m pretty sure all this one is trying to convey is “pluggers are bad at golf.” Which, fair enough! Probably a lot of them are!

Mary Worth, 10/15/23

I guess Sonia is using the past tense here because her father is now retired from the military and the police, but I prefer to believe that she surreptitiously poisoned his root beer earlier in the evening, as soon as she realized he was the living, beefy embodiment of the Authority that she’s fought against her whole young life. You’re a dead man walking, Keith!

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Mary Worth, 10/14/23

Uh oh! Keith may have been willing to agreed to disagree on whether or not society should be allowed to disintegrate into chaos, but my understanding is that U.S. Marines very much do not like it when you call them “soldiers,” which is what the guys in the Army are. Totally different branch! This is a line Sonia will regret crossing.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/14/23

Wait, Buzz was locked in that car trunk for days and it’s only his shirt that’s fragrant? I think I’m finally seeing what the medical angle in this Rex Morgan, M.D., plot is going to be.

Beetle Bailey, 10/14/23

Sorry, I know it’s still the weekend, but I’m going to have to call in sick and spend next week lying down now that I know that there’s an analogue to Hooters in the Beetle Bailey universe and it’s called “Honkers.”