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Mary Worth, 7/29/23

Are you suffering from depression? Well, the good people at Mary Worth suggest that you simply reunite with a long lost friend, which will clear the problem up entirely. If you don’t have any friends, that frankly is not Mary Worth’s problem. Have you considered getting held hostage and barely escaping with your life? That’s a great way to meet people.

Hi and Lois, 7/29/23

Thirsty being kind of aggressively “fun” and wacky, waving his hands around … he’s drunk, right? Like, more than usual? I get why he’s so insistent, though: he’s finally figured out the secret to making golf fun and doesn’t want to let it go to waste.

Pluggers, 7/29/23

The way the he-plugger is clutching his chest here is evocative and disturbing to me. “Please, dear, stand up. We just need to make it to the car. We can’t afford the ambulance ride. I know you can do it!”

Gil Thorp, 7/29/23

“Imagine what they get away with in adult prisons. Oh, hey, I just happen to have this DVD about what they get away with in adult women’s prisons! Maybe we could watch that instead of the game? Ha ha, just kidding. Unless…?”

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Six Chix, 7/3/23

I like this one! I like this one because it implies either that crabs are the undersea equivalent of Americans, or that in the far future, Americans will evolve into crabs and take to the sea in order to escape our blighted surface but still retain a dim memory of the national habits and holidays of their distant ancestors. Either way, they exist in some sort of celebratory symbiosis with the jellyfish, a relationship that (I hope) is mutually beneficial.

The Lockhorns, 7/3/23

I’m really loving these two dudes sitting at the bar with big smiles on their faces. They’re all in the Hate Wife Club! Leroy is their new best friend and tonight they’re gonna tear this town up (have three more cocktails, get morose, the other two are going to call their wives up and beg for forgiveness and go home and leave Leroy with the beardy bartender who gets increasingly pointed as closing time approaches and Leroy continues to refuse to make eye contact).

Pluggers, 7/3/23

C’mon, man, that’s not a possum, that’s a bear! Oh, wait, he’s just playing possum. Anyway, c’mon, man, he’s not pretending to be dead, he’s actually dead! Been dead for hours! Kangaroo lady’s going to figure it out soon and it’s gonna hit her like a ton of bricks!

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Dick Tracy, 6/16/23

Dick Tracy is, indeed, a rich tapestry: one of its supporting characters, Diet Smith, is a wealthy scientist whose inventions have conquered both space and time, which led to sci-fi adventures on the Moon (whose people are now hiding in Antarctica), but the strip’s world also has room for comical rustics like the Plenty family with their old-timey phones and in-home poultry. These two storylines have collided both in Dick’s family, because his son married Moon Maid, the Moon Governor’s daughter, who later got blown up by car bomb, and then he married Sparkle Plenty, Gertie and B.O.’s daughter, but then Moon Maid came back and everyone got uncomfortable for a while until it turned out she was just a gangster’s girlfriend modified with moon DNA and forbidden science. Whew! That’s quite enough Dick Tracy backstory for the moment, so we’ll have to leave for another time the questions of whether the Moon Governor is aware that he’s named a new space coup after his dead daughter’s widower’s second wife, or why he uses “M.G.” as his initials. (Is “Moon Governor” his name?)

Pluggers, 6/16/23

All of us, pluggers and cosmopolitans a like, define ourselves and our tribes in part in terms of the qualities and habits in the Other that we lack. I am surely guilty of this in my many comments on the Pluggers syndicated newspaper panel, but I feel confident the panels themselves engage in the same practice, and I cannot look at this one without assuming that your typical plugger thinks my razor blades, my face, and indeed my entire coastal elite bathroom are simply awash in blood.

Judge Parker, 6/16/23

[extremely “LET’S GET READY TO RUMMMMMMBLE” voice] LET’S GET READY FOR THE SUMMER 2023 JUDGE PARKER POLYCUUUUUUUULE