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FOLKS, I neglected in yesterday’s return post to promote the big event of Comics Award Season: The Fifteenth (!) Annual Worthy Awards, in which faithful reader Wanders nominates the best of Mary Worth’s 2022 shenanigans and you, the readers, pick the winners. You’ll be choosing the Panel of the Year, Quote of the Year, outstanding performances from regular and guest characters, and, of course, the most coveted award of all, Outstanding Floating Head. Vote early and often!

Dennis the Menace, 1/3/23

Man, look, I don’t know if the menace here is supposed to be “Ha ha, Dennis thinks his childhood likes and dislikes reflect the overall business climate” or “Ha ha, vegetarians, amiright, even a child knows they’re gross,” but what really bothers me here are the … things … inside the shuttered restaurant. Are they potted plants — like a lot of potted plants, like way too many potted plants for a small space? Are they bowls containing the aforementioned organic vegetarian cuisine, as drawn by someone whose restaurant habits are Applebee’s-centric and this is what they think vegetarians eat? Are they leftover bowls of vegetarian meals that, abandoned by their creators, have sprouted into aggressive, powerful plants that will have their revenge on us? Each option is more unsettling than the last.

Gasoline Alley, 1/3/23

Couldn’t really tell you how Gasoline Alley got to this point but I am amusing myself by trying to figure out what terrible emergency at the North Pole would get Santa to abruptly abandon his tropical vacation. Like, probably a violent elf labor revolt that his trained Pinkertons have been unable to suppress, right? Or maybe word has gotten back that Mrs. Claus is having a dalliance with Jack Frost or something? Honestly, the funniest answer is that Rudolf is trained to summon him on a fake “emergency” if a child insists on talking to him for more than ten minutes during his vacation, and they’re just going to circle back to the beach as soon as the kids leave.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 1/3/23

Meanwhile, diabolical scientists in Mother Goose and Grimm have created a perfume so alluring that it will stir up murderous violence in anyone who so much as sniffs it! Or it’s just deadly poisonous, honestly kind of hard to tell what they’re getting at.

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Crankshaft, 12/16/22

Hey, did you know that “deja vu” means “seen again,” and that “vu” is the past participle of the verb “voir,” which means “to see,” and that an earlier form of the same French word entered English after the Norman conquest and gave rise to the English word “view”? Or, to put it more succinctly, did you know that “view” and “vu” are basically the same word? And so this isn’t really much of a pun or anything at all? I know the bar for Crankshaft wordplay is very low, but surely it should be higher than this?

Mother Goose and Grimm, 12/16/22

It probably won’t come as surprise to you that I’ve been reading Mother Goose and Grimm for a long time, possible since it first launched in 1984. I have a vague memory that Ralph (the Boston terrier) was not an original character, but was introduced some time into the strip’s run, maybe? But if so he’s been around for years. Years. You’d think … Grimm would know if his friend had a job? Or at least, some politics weird enough that he’d she tears over Mr. Potter?

Crock, 12/16/22

I’d like to think that whoever on the Crock creative team wrote this strip in the 1990s or whenever this first ran had heard of boom boxes, by which I mean had heard the phrase “boom box,” but didn’t really know what they were. A box that booms, probably? That’s why they call it that, right? Not sure what the box looks like, better not draw it, but we can be pretty confident about the booms.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/16/22

You absolutely cannot make me care about this conversation Rex and June are having about not having any more kids, but I am profoundly unnerved by the way each frame is a closer and closer zoom in on one of their faces. Here’s hoping this trend continues and by Sunday we just have word balloons emerging from six panels of undifferentiated, featureless pinky-peach flesh.

Family Circus, 12/16/22

Uh oh! Big Daddy Keane’s gonna get arrested!

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 10/20/22

You know what? You, yes you, have made the conscious choice to taked time out of your one wild and precious life to read a weblog called “The Comics Curmudgeon,” and sometimes the posts on that weblog aren’t going to be really very intellectual or high-falutin’ and will instead just boil down to “god I find this particular comic strip irritating.” Anyway, today’s Mother Goose and Grimm irritates me because I want the “lake” part of the setup to figure into the punchline. It rhymes with “bake and shake” but it turns out not be relevant at all? Usually the generic version of this kind of wish actually refers to the “ocean,” which is why using a rhyme like this that ends up a red herring is all the more annoying to me. Is there a lake that’s profoundly important to the Mother Goose and Grimm deep lore? One I don’t know about?

Judge Parker, 10/20/22

What’s it gonna be, Sam? Are you gonna listen to your soon to be ex-wife, who is divorcing you but still wants your life to be as boring as possible, or your former legal secretary, who wants to go after the the crooked cops and the meth gangs tonight with absolutely zero time spent strategizing in any way? Huh? What’s it gonna be? Think of your readers, Sam, your readers. They’re desperate for entertainment! And you’re one of the main characters in this strip, so you’re not going to die on this adventure! Probably!