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Mary Worth, 12/2/22

Now, I’m just a simple country blogger, not a fancy math wizard, but if I’m counting right, Nan is around 12ish years older than Zak, whereas Iris, who has noted that Zak is Tommy’s age, is closer to 20 years her beau’s senior. We may be on the verge of a spectacle in which a woman feels threatened by the youth and vitality of her fiance’s former babysitter, which is a truly amazing sentece to write about an ostensibly dull comic strip like Mary Worth. And where is Tommy’s actual mother in all this Oedipal jockeying? I assume she was absent, both physically and emotionally, during his childhood, so if she bothers to show up for the wedding, things could get even more weird and fraught, which is how I like my newspaper soap opera comic strips.

Dennis the Menace, 12/2/22

I kind of enjoy the fact that we’re getting this limp gag as Alice gets Dennis dressed up in an adorable little suit and tie, even though their conversation is about a different topic entirely. Like, we know they’re heading for a fancy dinner with Henry’s coworkers where Dennis is going to blurt out something to the effect of “My dad says you’re a drunk,” but until then we’re going to kill time with a little Family Circus style darndest things saying, just as a warmup.

Funky Winkerbean, 12/2/22

Wow, it turns out that the book Summer is going to write will lead to a future where our allegiances to individual nation-states are replaced by a worldwide algorithm-driven form of governance. Sounds dystopian, sure, but probably all memory of Lisa’s Story has been purged from humanity’s collective consciousness, because Summer’s book is the Only Book that the drones of the 22nd century will need, so maybe we shouldn’t be too hasty in judging this new age.

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Curtis, 11/30/22

Curtis may have been a little late in celebrating Charles Schulz’s 100th birthday, but it’s making up for lost time with a whole week of beloved Peanuts character Franklin tutoring the strip’s education-resistent title character. They’re going to the always reliable joke of “this art style’s specific stylizations would look baffling and grotesque in the context of another art style with a different set of stylizations, were characters from the two universes to coexist.” Curtis may be focused on Franklin’s huge mouth, but I’m more weirded out by his mohawk. I guess if you 3D-modeled Franklin based on the original drawings, you’d come to the conclusion that he had a mohawk, but I don’t think he had a mohawk.

Mary Worth, 11/30/22

Oh, that mysterious figure from Zak’s past? You’d better believe it’s his beloved baby sitter, the one who made him the delicious rice-gravy slurry that to this day serves as an erotic Proustian madeleine! I think it’s very funny that in the last few days in this strip characters have spent a lot of time blissfully thinking about how Zak and Iris’s age gap isn’t problematic at all, and now suddenly we’re barreling full-speed towards “WHICH SUBSTITUE MOMMY WILL WIN?????” territory.

Beetle Bailey 11/30/22

I was pretty mad at Beetle’s response in the first panel when I read it, to be honest. Why does it have to have something to do with you, Beetle? Why can’t your girlfriend just tell you something interesting about her workplace and her day, huh? But then in the second panel it quickly becomes clear that their relationship is in fact wholly transactional, which frankly is a real downer.

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Mary Worth, 11/27/22

Ah, this is the point in the Mary Worth storyline where all the characters have been chirpily telling each other how great everything is for weeks until we, the readers, want to die, but then we hit a sudden shocking twist: what if things … aren’t great? Aren’t great at all? What if there’s a certain someone from Zak’s past that’s he’s ben missing all these years? That would be quite a development! Remember, Zak used to have an age-appropriate friend group, but I guess they abandoned him when his dumb girlfriend started hanging around him all the time, so maybe it’s one of them? On the other hand, maybe it’s Wilbur. Wilbur and Zak used to hang out! Zak thinks Wilbur is pretty cool, which is deeply troubling!

Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/27/22

Wow, Loweezy looks genuinely distressed in the second throwaway panel here, doesn’t she? Please, Snuffy, you’ve got to get up and hunt! Your family has no money and is on the brink of starvation!