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Mary Worth, 6/28/17

One of my big disappointments in Mary Worth over the past few years is that her stints filling in as Ask Wendy have been pretty dull. I’m kind of an aficionado of advice columns, and let me tell you, one of the main keys to having a good one is to start by curating the interesting ones of the presumable flood of banal queries you get. The best letters to advice columnists take you on a journey; for me, one of the best ones ever was in this Dear Prudence column, the one titled “How to respect a vet on Memorial Day” (scroll down, it’s at the end). It starts with “I may have thoughtlessly offended my war veteran neighbor by inviting him to a birthday party on Memorial Day weekend,” takes a sudden left turn into “this hot, hot vet and I are both in unhappy marriages and have an unspoken attraction so I want to honor his service without giving anybody the wrong idea,” and barrels home into “I’m only staying with my husband so that his daughter doesn’t have to graduate high school in a broken home.” I assume that as an advice columnist, your main task is actually separating the “horny for heroes” wheat from the “How do I decide which of two very vaguely described job offers I should accept” chaff, but Mary seems to think she should just answer whichever question shows up in her inbox first.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up as that Mary should learn from this interaction with Derek. Because you know what would make a classic advice columnist letter? Someone starting with something boring like “My wife and I kept fighting about my cigarette habit” and then somehow ending up with “so there I was, making out with a cruise ship entertainer right outside our cabin…”

Family Circus, 6/28/17

This is just some bug Jeffy found an hour ago, making this a pretty low-stakes interaction Ma Keane can use to practice when she for has to have the same conversation with him about Barfy, or Billy.

Pluggers, 6/28/17

Pluggers are fine when their wives see their ancient, poop-encrusted underwear, but when visiting a medical professional still feel a twinge of shame.

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Mary Worth, 6/21/17

Well, I guess it’s not exactly a surprise that this plotline is going to climax with these two busty ladies getting into a no-holds-barred catfight for Derek’s smoky love, and while I think that’s a bit of a cliche, I have to admit I enjoy the direction panel two is taking it. Decades of girl-on-girl fights over men in movies and on TV have trained you to expect that both ladies would grab at each other’s hair the moment this argument escalated from swearing to violence. Instead, as the rain starts pouring out of the dark sky over the endless ocean, Katie looks wide-eyed at Esme’s fury, and leans back over the guardrail. She’s leaning away from her rival’s outstretched hands, of course, but something about her expression seems to carry both epiphany and resignation. “Has it come to this?” she thinks. “Do I need to debase myself in this way, just to keep hold of someone who’s chosen another path? What if I just let gravity take me, let the water rush together over my head? There are worse ways to go than in the arms of the sea.”

Pluggers, 6/21/17

I don’t care if you’ve been a plugger’s doctor for years. I don’t care if you’ve been married to a plugger for your entire adult life. If you don’t understand that for him the whole point of drinking coffee is to ride that buzz until it eats him out from the inside, then you don’t understand him at all.

Dick Tracy, 6/21/17

YOU DIDN’T WANT TO RISK ANYONE’S SAFETY BY STARTING A GUNFIGHT???

WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH DICK TRACY

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Pluggers, 6/17/17

Maybe it’s my own plugger-esque simplicity, but I genuinely get a kick out of the “Pluggers seems to forget that its main characters are animal-people and that introducing actual animals into the narrative is confusing” installments of Pluggers, and today might be my favorite yet. Ha ha, it’s funny because pluggers save money on grooming by just stripping naked and letting their friends hose them down in a bucket in their backyard!

Hi and Lois, 6/17/17

Big shoutout to Hi and Lois for providing the grimmest “punchline” the comics will see this month, probably! Ha ha, it’s funny because Hi is sadly staring into the fire, reflecting on the unbridgeable emotional chasm between himself and his family!

Dennis the Menace, 6/17/17

“Was that menacing? Is nitpicking on etymology menacing? Jesus Christ, I’m exhausted, it’s the weekend, lemme just … lemme just leave it at that, OK? Stepladders, I dunno man.”