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Mary Worth, 10/4/24

Look, Stell, you’re clearly a vibrant, attractive woman with an active romantic and sexual life. Nevertheless, you’re a woman of a certain age, with “certain” meaning “not young,” as evidenced by the fact that you fell for an extremely common elder scam not that long ago. There’s nothing wrong with being on the older side, of course, but it’s important to have some self-awareness and not try to deploy unfamiliar youth slang, OK? Take “ghosted,” for instance: this describes a situation where you’re seeing someone with various possible degrees of seriousness, or are at least gearing up to do so, but then they abruptly cut off contact with you and stop replying to your texts/emails/DMs/other communication attempts. It very much does not describe a situation where your fiance cancels on you for a social event at the last minute, but does so by sending you a text at the time explaining why he’s doing it. You used the word wrong and that’s just how it is! Mary doesn’t know any better, but the youth of today do, so please choose your words more carefully next time in case they overhear you. We would’ve allowed the use of “ghosting” in this context if Ed had died (for instance, by doing emergency surgery on a corgi while exhausted and accidentally slicing his femoral artery with the scalpel and bleeding out on the floor of his own clinic) and, desperate to still make the engagement dinner, he showed up as a ghost. That’s not the usual use of the term but I don’t think anyone would’ve given you trouble. But he didn’t do that either, he did the first thing I said (didn’t show up but explained why and then you saw him not long afterwards, which is also antithetical to the whole “ghosting” concept).

Dennis the Menace, 10/4/24

Ha ha, it’s funny because Mrs. Wilson is admitting the sad truth: she and George are just going through the motions, living but going no further, not experiencing the style and verve that make life worth living. It’s like it only took a few minutes of respite from Dennis’s low-key menacing for them to look the true existential menace square in the face.

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Gil Thorp, 10/1/24

Ah, well, it seems that Gil’s airborne lovefest under old artist Rod Whigham was some kind of hallucination he was having during a massive cardiac event on the sideline of a football game, and now, under new artist Rachel Merrill, he lingers comatose in a hospital, kept alive by machines the size of a 1950s mainframe computer. Anyway, this is a perfect time for Keri to confess to bulimia, I guess, and just like the time in Mary Worth when Dr. Jeff’s drippy daughter accepted her cop boyfriend’s proposal when he was in a coma, this will only lead to positive outcomes.

Gasoline Alley, 10/1/24

Gasoline Alley will never try to confuse us with abrupt narrative shifts. In fact, if characters who we last saw a year and a half ago appear in the strip, Gasoline Alley will remind you what their names are by having another character say them out loud, in bold type! Gasoline Alley is just thoughtful like that, and as a rapidly aging member of its audience, I appreciate it.

Mary Worth, 10/1/24

Sorry, Estelle, I know your mind is clouded with sorrow right now, but you had both these pets for some time before you met Ed, so he can’t possibly have achieved “daddy” status with them. Technically Wilbur owned Pierre before he handed him off to you because of their complete failure to bond emotionally, so to Pierre Wilbur is daddy! Frankly this just seems to be pointing towards a reunion wiOH NO OH NO OH NO ABORT ABORT ABORT

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Mary Worth, 9/29/24

I’m going to remain neutral on some the big moral questions being raised by this storyline for the moment (Is it fair to fall in love with a passionate man then demand that he give up his passions to focus on you? Why, in a relatively small community that nevertheless can support a whole convention’s worth of veterinarians, is Ed somehow the only vet available for seemingly every emergency call? Does it make sense to put “a reunion dinner with a once beloved but subsequently estranged family member” and “a visit to the bakery to taste cake” in the same “wedding stuff you can skip” bucket?). Mostly, I want to say that chucking your engagement ring directly into your fiance’s chest at full speed and watching it bounce off is a very funny move, and I’m glad we got to see it in today’s strip.

Marvin, 9/29/24

There are all kinds of dubious things that I am willing to accept as part of the Marvin world-building, such as the fact that babies and dogs have adult-human-level cognition and ability to communicate, but neither has mastered the simple art of shitting in a toilet. However, seeing dogs just casually wandering around suburban neighborhoods unleashed immediately exceeds my ability to suspend disbelief. I realize that the idea of this has been ossified into comics lore but I refuse to believe that anyone actually involved in producing the comics in the futuristic year 2024 personally remembers a time when this was commonplace.

Six Chix, 9/29/24

I find the drawing of the plumber at bottom right interacting with a undersink cabinet that has been removed from its context (the sink) very funny. “Welp, let me see if the problem is from inside your Portal and–” [horrified screams as he is pulled into the ~v o i d~]