Post Content

Mary Worth, 4/26/23

OK, look, I was willing to accept it when we only got a day of Wilbur singing karaoke while sobbing openly, but now we find out that a cat tried to blind Dr. Ed and now he’s wearing an eye patch and we didn’t get to see that at all? Unacceptable! Still, I see two potentially funny ways forward: either Ed’s briefly rekindled love affair with the veterinary profession has now been snuffed out for good, and he’s brooding one-eyedly and thinking about burning the building down for the insurance and starting over again in a new town as a simple bricklayer, or the whole incident was relayed to Estelle over the phone as he explained that he needed to “take some time off” from their relationship to sit in a dark room and heal (i.e., spend more time with his wife and children so they don’t get suspicious).

Judge Parker, 4/26/23

This is part of a larger storyline about April finally getting released from her illegal CIA prison for implausible reasons, but right now let’s just acknowledge that it’s very funny to cruelly mutter “Yeah, let’s end this” as you get yet another spam call.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/26/23

I’m not afraid to admit that I was genuinely surprised by the punchline in today’s Snuffy Smith: I assumed that Snowball was the seeker, and that he thought he’d have an easy time finding Li’l Sparky because horses are quite large in general, larger than most available hiding spaces, and that Li’l Sparky in particular is wearing a bright yellow blanket to boot. But, no, it turns out that Li’l Sparky is the seeker, and playing Hide and Seek with him is easy because he’s not very smart.

Pluggers, 4/26/23

Sorry, I was going to try to figure out what this joke is supposed to mean, exactly, but then I got stuck on the idea that there’s a carton of milk just off panel to our left and it’s hurling at this plugger at high speed and about to hit him right in the nose, and while I’m reasonably sure that’s not what this joke is supposed to mean, I’m enjoying that image too much to part with it.

Post Content

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/23/23

Like all industries, the newspaper soap opera strip game is inevitably prone to jealousies and copycat moves when one strip has a true breakout moment — like, say, when a character falls to his death off a cruise ship, except it turns out that he didn’t really die, actually. Still, it’s hard to top the original, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I feel like Wilbur earned his not-death, in that we had quite a bit of lead-up involving him getting drunk, feuding with Estelle, doing the “King of the World” thing, etc. Whereas this storyline seemed to be hinting instead at some battle of wits between Rene and Hank Jr. that might eventually escalate to a battle of fists, but instead we just get Rene going from 0 to murder in a single panel, and Hank foiling said murder attempt two panels later by simply stepping out of the way, an act that can never be spun as “exciting” even if the narration box describes it with an exclamation point. Anyway, I’m not sure if Rene is actually dead or just Wilbur dead, but I do hope that either way a few hours in the bosom of the sea dissolves a lot of that spirit gum so that, when they fish him/his corpse out, his dumb chinbeard is only halfway attached.

Mary Worth, 4/23/23

Speaking of people who died, but then didn’t die, but then died a much more crushing death, which is to say a romantic and emotional death, here’s Wilbur, sob-singing his way through 1976 banger “Don’t Cry Out Loud” in front of a karaoke crowd that I assume is cringing so hard they’re sustaining internal organ damage, and then we smash cut to Dr. Ed and Estelle publicly canoodling and declaring their love for one another. It’s perfect, and now that you’ve read it, you can go do some lawn work or spring cleaning or just lie down and have a nice little Sunday nap, because all is right with the world.

Post Content

Six Chix, 4/22/23

I feel like there are few more depressing sentences in the English language than “cake is biodegradable,” which implies that these people aren’t going to eat this delicious cake but are rather just going to leave it out in this open field to slowly rot. These are (I think?) children and the cake is almost as big as they are, so it’s unrealistic to expect them to eat all of it, but still, it’s quite melancholy. I suppose it’s supposed to be the Earth Day equivalent of that time a British train museum tossed a chocolate cake into a locomotive’s firebox for its 145th birthday, but like, a lot less fun.

Rhymes With Orange, 4/22/23

A lot of strips did Earth Day jokes today, and I spent quite a while trying to figure out if this was one of them, but I don’t think it was! I think it’s just a strip asking us to contemplate whether a bird cleaning the food out of a crocodile’s teeth is an erotic experience, for either party.

Mary Worth, 4/22/23

If you were at a karaoke studio and a visibly angry man got on stage and announced “This song is dedicated to me … because I need to hear this!”, how excited would you be for what was about to happen, on a scale from 10 to some kind of number that’s so large that only our most powerful computers could even generate it?