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Mary Worth, 6/13/19

This is a full time Wilbur/Estelle (Wilbstelle? Estbur?) fanblog now and you can just deal with it. Today I am mesmerized by the massive burger looming in the background, which I guess is an image on the window of Delicious Grill(e?) but looks like some kind of hovering alien being, whose research on Earth determined that hamburgers were plentiful and therefore an inconspicuous form to take, beaming love rays into Wilbur and Estelle’s brains and convincing them to head back to Estelle’s apartment for piano playing and sex, for whatever inscrutable reason (presumably the alien’s spacecraft is powered by the energy produced when two middle-aged people settle for one another).

Dennis the Menace, 6/13/19

I’m not even going to bother assessing Dennis’s menacing level here, and instead I’m just going to point out the truly bizarre arrangement of furniture in the Mitchells’ living room. Like, did Henry or Alice deliberately move one of the chairs so that they could sit angrily near each other like this? Or is this the permanent arrangement, acknowledging that their amity could shatter into mutual animus at any moment, but their fundamental attraction precludes either of them from just storming out of the room?

Six Chix, 6/13/19

Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that the new owner of your favorite bakery is extremely cheap — he’s skimping on the lemon bars so that it’s like eating all dough and no filling; you order them all the time and you can tell. Sure, you could call a friend on the phone to tell them about it, and that has its satisfaction. But what if you had a syndicate newspaper comic? Then you could tell thousands of people all over the country your tale of woe! Admittedly, that story wouldn’t contain a “joke” per se, but years doing a syndicated newspaper comic will have taught you that if this was once a reason to stop a comic strip from being published, it no longer is and hasn’t been for some time.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/13/19

Check out Rex’s thinkin’ face in that last panel. “Wait, you can just pay people to go away? Because I’ve got plenty of money and I don’t like people very much. This could really work out for me!”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/28/19

Welp, I guess we’re gonna drag this botched robbery out even though all the danger has immediately dissipated. Maybe our boy Justin is standing a little too close to a couple of dudes that he just called the heavily armed cops on? Is someone gonna get killed in the crossfire? Can it be Justin? Please, I just need to feel something, anything when I read this comic strip.

Funky Winkerbean, 5/28/19

Hmm, looks like Cliff’s kemosabe reference was maybe really about Lisa, the beloved Funky Winkerbean character who, as you may have forgotten, died of cancer? There’s gotta be a connection there, right? Maybe the connection is “‘Kemosabe’ is a catchphrase from The Lone Ranger, which for decades was one of the most popular media franchises in America and so lots of people are familiar with it.” Just brainstorming!

Beetle Bailey, 5/28/19

Crushingly depressing Beetle Baileys are usually about the Halftrack marriage, but today’s strip is really mixing it up! It features Sgt. Lugg’s face crumpling because she realizes that she’s sitting on an army cot and eating something out of a dog bowl with a spoon, as part of a date.

Pajama Diaries, 5/28/19

STOP TRYING TO MAKE “THE PAJAMA DIARIES PEOPLE ARE A FUN MIDDLE-AGED COUPLE WHO ARE INTO BDSM” HAPPEN

IT’S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN

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Blondie, 5/26/19

Longtime joshreads dot com trufans know that one of my obsessions about the comic strip Blondie is that Dagwood and Blondie and their teenage children live in a house that, as near we can tell, doesn’t have a shower. We see the inside of their bathroom repeatedly (some might say too often for comfort), and we’ve never seen a shower head or shower curtain. We know that Dagwood prefers baths himself, but it seems bizarre for him to impose his lifestyle choices on his family, especially considering that adding a shower head wouldn’t prevent him from bathing in his preferred manner.

Anyway, today we learn that there is a second bathroom somewhere in the Bumstead residence! Is this where non-Dagwood family members shower, like normal people? And where is this other bathroom? We know that the tub-bathroom where today’s action takes place is on the second floor. Is the tub-bathroom a master bath? Is the more typical bathroom usually the one the kids used, but Blondie has had enough and finally just wants to take a shower today, god damn it? I’ll return to this topic once I finish my elaborate digital 3D model of the Bumstead house, which will rival the diagrams of the Overlook Hotel that the Kubrick obsessives of Room 237 came up with.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/26/19

Good news, everyone! Any sense of dramatic tension that might’ve been created by this robbery has been dissipated in just four days, which has to be some kind of record. And the big resolution also reveals that nobody was ever in the slightest danger this whole time! What a relief!