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Family Circus, 10/27/20

I am extremely tickled that Dolly is standing on a stool in order to deliver this joke. I assume it’s a practical cartooning matter — if she were on the floor, she’d be cropped out by the circular border of the panel — but I’d like to imagine that she laboriously dragged the stool in in from the other room and climbed up on it so she could really get in her mother’s face with her latest nonsense, with Ma Keane refusing to make eye contact with her or acknowledge her in any way all the while.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/27/20

So it turns out the bad thing Sarah did was … that she gave her self a haircut, and not even in a comical or interesting way, and June was able to fix it without too much trouble, and even if she couldn’t, Sarah is like eight years old and does everything by Zoom right now, so who cares if her hair looks a little funny, you know? But that isn’t going to stop us from debriefing about it for days, and it won’t stop Rex — who, remember, is working in a COVID ward and the current strips are taking place in the initial wave of the pandemic so presumably he’s watching multiple people die daily despite his best medical efforts — from treating this as the biggest disappointment he’s encountered in his life to date. Rex says that he would’ve never thought to cut his own hair as a child, and it definitely tracks that he was boring as shit from the minute he was born.

Mark Trail, 10/27/20

Oh, huh, I see that Happy Trail Farms really is where various Mark clones are spawned using forbidden science, exactly as I predicted. Maybe we need to have a Crisis on Infinite Trails, with DoddTrail, ElrodTrail, and AllenTrail vanquished in combat, before RiveraTrail can thrive, to the extent that freelance writing in the clickbait era can be called “thriving.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/27/20

Ha ha, it’s funny because Hootin’ Holler is so impoverished and isolated that it cannot participate in the modern economy, which is built around the mass manufacturing of complex devices out of standardized and interchangeable components!

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Mary Worth, 10/21/20

OK, I had to go back to last week to make sure I understood the timeline here so that I can anticipate the exact level of hilarity we’re about to encounter. After Tommy’s failed onion ring proposal, Brandy cut the date short, claiming she “wasn’t feeling well,” which we all assumed was code for “was just proposed to by a guy she wasn’t ready to marry, and also he used an onion ring to do it,” but I guess she really wasn’t feeling well, and now is about to leave the house, after what I assume is only a few minutes, and head down to the drug store. Speaking of drugs, Tommy only seemed to walk a block or so from Brandy’s house before being waylaid by his old drug buddy and offered some delicious drugs. Clearly this means that Brandy, who you’ll recall has a lot of semi-unresolved issues about her own dad’s struggle with addiction and who was assured that Tommy’s problems in that department are thoroughly in his past, is about to stumble upon her boyfriend enjoying a big hit of the ol’ crack cocaine — or, better, looking like he’s about to enjoy a big hit even though he’s actually about to turn it down. I’m very excited about this!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/21/20

I’m sure whatever bad thing Sarah has done is extremely low stakes, but please let me cling, just for a moment, to the idea that Sarah has succeeded where Nancy has repeatedly failed and is throwing an absolute rager of a COVID party in the rec room right now.

Dustin, 10/21/20

I honestly enjoy Dustin’s dad’s wry little smile in the final panel. It’s like he’s thinking, “Huh, I would’ve guessed me and the rest of our family were the things she was most grateful for, but at least we both hate it when other people have fun.”

Marvin, 10/21/20

God, I’m not sure what I would’ve come up with if you had asked me what the grimmest possible thing for a fish to say might be, but “I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a fish” has got to be pretty high on the list.

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Gil Thorp, 10/9/20

The current football plot mostly focuses on the most classic form of football plot known to science: a quarterback controversy! Who will be Milford’s starting quarterback this year: Terry Rapson, or, uh, the other guy, whose name I forget? This would be a much more interesting storyline if either Terry or the other guy were interesting or if I could tell them apart, but things may be looking up, because Terry was ordered by Coach Thorp to run out the clock at the end of the last game but decided to throw some touchdowns instead, and now they’re locked in a battle of wills during which Gil plans to break Terry in mind, body, and soul. But Terry’s resisting! Keep it up, Terry, Gil will definitely get bored of this soon enough.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/9/20

Oh, man, remember when we were teased with the idea that something interesting might happen in this strip but then it was all resolved off-panel? Well, it seems we are actually being allowed to see someone try to do something interesting, though they were immediately stopped before anything interesting actually happened. I’m not sure what’s funnier: that Nancy’s parents have given up on trying to stop her COVID-spreading ways themselves and have just sent out an APB to all the local disreputable hotels, or that the photo they sent is of her trademark sneer. I certainly hope they have a big framed version of that picture hanging over the fireplace!