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Archive: Pardon My Planet

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Friday is for avoiding suffering

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Pardon My Planet, 2/28/25

Not sure how we’re meant to understand the scenario here: did this couple literally spend their last dime on this beach vacation, leaving them in a position where they would be forced to stiff their dog-sitter when they got home? Or has the relatively small charge for dog-sitting services — which in my experience is usually paid in advance, these days often through Rover or other similar apps — pushed them across some threshold where they’re forced to acknowledge their own acute financial crisis, possibly because they recognize that they’ll be unable to make even the minimum payment on their credit card when it next comes due? At any rate, their problems are over now, as will their lives be in a few days when the massive dose of radiation they’re absorbing right now finally kills them both.

Mary Worth, 2/28/25

I have to admit “Why do people learn things the hard way instead of accepting advice?” is a pretty good tactic for talking up an advice column. People are, I think it goes without saying, pretty lazy, and if you explain that half-reading Ask Wendy on their phone while they’re watching TV or something is a “life hack” that allows them to avoid the terrifying, vivid highs and lows of an active and emotionally full life, I think they might go for it.

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Unpleasant heterosexuality comix

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Pardon My Planet, 1/30/25

There’s a joke at the core of this panel that is, if not good per se, at least perfectly serviceable — ha ha, her husband is a dick about her cooking so she’s going to poison him! — but it’s assembled in such a shambolic and confusing way that it actually loops all the way through “bad” to “fascinating.” I love the idea of the husband sitting at the dinner table, white-knuckle gripping his silverware and waiting patiently for his wife to prepare his meal, which he already assumes he’ll hate, because of the shows she watches on TV, but also he declines or perhaps refuses to turn around and look at the TV to see if it’s that show that gets his wife to make the food he hates. Add in the fact that the wife apparently needs advice from a literal witch, a woman skilled in chthonic folk magic and also green, to know that pouring liquid from a bottle labeled with a prominent skull and crossbones is what’s going to kill her husband. I dunno, I think if I had that on hand already, I could’ve guessed it’d be bad to use as salad dressing (or good, depending on your end goal) without the TV witch telling me. I’m just an “independent thinker” like that.

Rex Morgan, 1/30/25

Hey, remember back when Estelle in Mary Worth went on a series of internet dates, each more comically unpleasant than the last? Well, Rex Morgan tried to recapture that magic but instead of Summer’s dates being “fun” bad, they were “boring” bad. Classic Rex Morgan! Anyway, as we all know, Estelle ended up in Wilbur’s sweaty arms at the end of the process, but apparently Rex Morgan is pitching as an alternative to the app scene going to a bar and hooking up with your daughter’s English teacher, who’s been harboring many a sexual thought about you since you came to a parent-teacher conference two years ago that you barely remember, what a coincidence, he definitely wasn’t sitting outside the restaurant watching your internet date unravel and plotting his next move.

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Crime and punishment comix

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Slylock Fox, 1/27/25

Now, on the surface, this one is a puzzle. I’m not talking about the actual puzzle in the strip, but the bigger picture: why would this ursine rustic be nattering on to the press here in an abstruse but technically correct way about the relative altitude at which he found this treasure chest? What does he possibly have to gain from it? I think the answer has to do with Slylock’s presence, actually: there’s something shady about that treasure (tax fraud? let’s say tax fraud) and he needs to distract Sly into aiming his big brain at just about anything else. Dropping an unusually precise trivia fact like “282 feet below sea level” is like throwing rice in front of a vampire: it’s such an obvious target for ratiocination that he simply won’t be able to not waste his time on it.

Pardon My Planet, 1/27/25

Hmm, so what I’m getting from this comic is that … the prosecuting attorney has called the defense attorney to the witness stand? And also the two of them are married to each other? Ha ha, this is an unusual court case indeed!