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Phantom, 11/3/20

My wife runs a lot of trainings for her job, which have predictably all become virtual trainings over the past six months, and her work sent her a handy little LED ring light to better illuminate her, but her home office is in the living room which gets great natural light and she doesn’t really need it, so it’s been repurposed for my Zoom comedy shows, which I run from my somewhat darker office. But what if we lived in a cave? What if we lived in a cave deep underground, with no natural light at all, but still had to do video calls for exposition purposes? Well, probably we would just get a normal set of lights that you would put in a house, since clearly the whole place is fully wired for electricity, but why not just set up a single theater-quality spotlight and point it directly at your head from like six feet away? The pros (long, moody shadows) surely outweighs the cons (profuse sweating).

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/3/20

“Oh, absolutely. Turns out caring for a bunch of sick, dying, highly infectious old people is a real drag. Plus that thing I heard on Facebook about doctors getting a bonus payment for every COVID patient was not true at all, and the CDC was extremely rude about it when I tried to invoice them.”

Family Circus, 11/3/20

Billy is so full of joy not because he gives a single shit about democracy, but because his teacher gave him such an incredibly easy assignment. What a dope! He’s gonna tape that thing up and not learn a damn thing, which is just how he likes it.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/31/20

Real Rex-heads know that one of the Morgans’ children is actually the biological son of June’s childhood best friend, who she hadn’t seen in years and who came back into her life just long enough to hand over her son to the Morgans’ care before dropping dead, and there was a brief moment where it looked like the kid’s paternal grandparents might want to fight them for custody, but it turned out they just wanted to baby-sit for free. Well, guess what: Rex and June need some free baby-sitting, so it looks like they won’t be letting the calls from these sad, lonely old people go straight to voice mail anymore!

Mary Worth, 10/31/20

Nothing really new to report in today’s Mary Worth, but “Tommy and Brandy argue at work through clenched teeth about who’s addicted to what and who isn’t like who’s dad” is exactly the sort of petty pleasure I — and, I assume, all of you — come to Mary Worth for.

Dick Tracy, 10/31/20

Oh, sorry, Little Orphan Annie isn’t a vampire! She’s just a former poor girl who got rich by sheer luck, and now she smiles warmly at people who help the currently poor from the back her limousine, without getting out to help or even saying hi herself. Which is, you know, a lot less interesting, frankly.

Dennis the Menace, 10/31/20

Did, uh, did Dennis steal a car? That’s pretty menacing, actually.

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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!