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Family Circus, 6/2/23

Nextdoor, the social network that’s like Facebook except instead of people who you actually like or at least know it’s full of people who happen to live near you, isn’t exactly a hotbed of positivity, but last summer, a nice lady posted a comment along the lines of “I’ve really been noticing the new trend of shorter shorts on men, and I just want to tell the gentlemen in the neighborhood who are partaking: I see you and I appreciate you.” I had just gone in for some shorter new J. Crew stretch chinos myself, and I have to wonder: was she talking about me? I guess I’ll never know, but I’d like think so. But none of us hipsters could hold a candle to Billy’s coach here, who quite clearly was drawn in another decade altogether. What do you think the original caption to this one was? I’m thinking “Can we delay the start of the game, Coach? My dad has to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes and also doesn’t want to hang out with me.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/2/23

Look, non-union Jughead equivalent: I’m not going to say I’m happy that Funky Winkerbean was finally put out to pasture, but I am frankly glad to no longer be thinking about convoluted comic strip timelines, so you can just keep your theories to yourself, buddy.

Marvin, 6/2/23

Wow, grandpa looks smug as hell! Not sure if that means that he is on the History Channel or he isn’t, but either way it’s an unpleasant vibe.

Mary Worth, 6/2/23

Damn you, Lyle Lovett! You’d better not eat that dog!

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Family Circus, 5/28/23

The Good Place was a great philosophical afterlife sitcom, and in its later seasons you learn that the titular Good Place (its cosmology’s equivalent of heaven) hasn’t had any new arrivals in centuries, because an increasingly complex and intertwined society has made it impossible for a living person to make any choice that doesn’t directly or indirectly cause harm to someone else. Today’s Family Circus, however, posits the flipside of this scenario: due to an overall lowering of human misery (in the long view violence worldwide really is probably lower now than any other time in history) plus a radical increase in population, heaven is simply being overwhelmed by a number of souls that its infrastructure simply isn’t equipped to handle, leaving the virtuous dead to sit packed together on clouds with little to do to occupy the rest of eternity, like inmates in an open-air prison camp. It’s not surprising that these spirits need to occasionally sneak back to the plane of the living to experience just enough sensory input to keep them from going mad!

Mary Worth, 5/28/23

Excuse me, Mary Worth, I thought it should’ve been obvious that when I called for a preemptive bans on “dogs in peril” plots, I meant not just that Eve’s dog should get a clean bill of health from the vet, but also that Greta should not be dognapped by a traveling dognapper who drives around in a muddy van with tricked out rims. Sorry, I guess I’ll try to be more specific next time, but until then let’s work on getting Greta liberated post-haste, OK?

Pluggers, 5/28/23

A plugger loves his wife … but he also loves the beast within her.

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Mary Worth, 5/23/23

We don’t know a ton about Saul’s past, but we do know that he was forced by his family to abandon his true love and enter into some kind of arranged marriage, presumably in order to consolidate their feudal landholdings and take advantage of agricultural efficiencies of scale. It was a loveless relationship and Saul bought a bigger tombstone for his dog than his wife, so I’m not sure how blessed any children would’ve felt being raised in that environment.

Pluggers, 5/23/23

I had a professor in college who once told me that “Ptolemaic Egypt was a theme park, and the theme was death,” a sentence I think about all the time. Anyway, pluggers are, like many of the Egyptian deities, half-man/half-beast creatures, although they lack pretty much any degree of those Gods’ dignity; still, it may be appropriate that they live their lives defined by an ever-growing army of the deceased.

Dennis the Menace, 5/23/23

I respect Mr. Wilson’s quest for perfect, unbroken silence, but I have serious questions about what exactly are in those things under the “Audiobooks” sign. Are they … CDs? Cassette tapes? Nobody actually listens to audiobooks off of physical media anymore, do they? Perhaps the Wilsons are shopping at The Big Warehouse For Old People Who Haven’t Figured Out What “Streaming” Is And Don’t Plan To In The Future, fighting against menacing changes in the media landscape the only way they know how (by keeping their VCRs working through dutiful maintenance).