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Mary Worth, 2/3/20

Folks, remember when Mary Worth storylines would be about randos who drifted into Mary’s orbit for a few months? Remember Delilah and Charley, and the guy who kept trying to convince his wife to eat more, and Nola the office sexpot, and Entertainer Esme? But for the last couple years, the strip has almost exclusively revolved around Wilbur and — I’m not afraid to say it! — people who are sex adjacent to Wilbur, i.e., Estelle (currently having sex with Wilbur), Iris (previously had sex with Wilbur), Dawn (would not exist if someone hadn’t once had sex with Wilbur), Tommy (the knowledge that at one point his mother was having sex with Wilbur on the regular almost certainly was one of the underlying causes of his drug habit), etc. Why can’t this strip stop rubbing it in our face that Wilbur fucks? It’s so bad that when we took a detour last year in a plotline that asked us to consider Ian Cameron a potential object of sexual desire, it came as a relief. Anyway, I assumed that Hugo would quietly fade out of the strip, just like he would quietly fade out of Dawn’s life, but it looks we’re going to get a plot where Wilbur has decided see what all the fuss is about re: the hot French guy his daughter’s fucking. Hopefully this time around he’ll have the courage to ask him “Are you a professional? Or into illegal activities?” to his face.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/3/20

Meanwhile, Rex Morgan, M.D., is doubling down on old people. Remember Aunt Tildy, and how she was convinced she ws dying? Welp, Rex ran some tests and it turned out she just had a fairly basic set of mild and easily treated age-related problems. Meanwhile, here’s Andrzej who’s healthy as a horse, maybe because the years he spent as partisan in the Polish forest as a teen fighting Nazis toughened him up, or maybe he just eats right and exercises, who can say, but the point is that Aunt Tildy could use more of his can-do attitude. Could Rex and June play matchmaker between these two? That might help Tildy find a real emotional grounding that will improve her outlook about her health, or at least get her out of the Morgans’ house.

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Crock, 1/22/20

One of the dangers of doing a syndicated comic strip for years is that you either subconsciously repeat a joke or just submit a strip you drew years ago hoping your editors won’t notice; and one of the dangers of writing a blog making fun of comic strips for (gulp) 15-plus years is that I’ll see one of these repeats and make more or less the same joke about it that I did long before. Sometimes I miss it, but sometimes as I’m about to hit “publish” a little voice nags at me that it all seems too familiar. So it was today, when I had a joke about how the characters in Crock aren’t in North Africa at all, but rather are parasites who reside on the flesh of some unimaginably huge creature; but then I got that aforementioned nagging feeling, and went walking through my archives, and sure enough, back in 2007, when the creator of the strip was still alive, I made basically this joke about an an entirely different strip that made basically this joke. Anyway! More proof that the Crock characters are all inhabitants of some awful living planet made of meat, or something! This is Crockiverse canon, and you have to think about it every time you read the strip!

Shoe, 1/22/20

Shoe, meanwhile, is relatively “with it” for a long-running legacy strip today: The Wiz is, after all, an expert in all things computers, and it would be unrealistic for him to try to convince Shoe that there’s any viable revenue model for online journalism.

Dustin, 1/22/20

You know, if you’re going to do a strip about a middle-aged character picking up some youth slang, it might behoove you to be really, really sure you know what said youth slang means, since “ghosting” refers not to dropping a text conversation with outstanding matters still unresolved, which is what from context the Dustin clan seems to be talking about here, but rather ending a romantic relationship with someone by wholly and abruptly cutting off communication with them. Granted, what with how the rest of them treat Dustin, it’d be fully believable that he’d finally get fed up and ghost them in the correct sense of the word!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/22/20

“Can’t people just die of old age anymore without having to make a big production out if it? I mean, come on.”

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Mary Worth, 1/20/20

Well, Thyroid Awareness Month has wrapped up nicely, with Zak doubling down on his grim determination to be the most supportive boyfriend possible by buying Iris healthy food and not making her feel bad about doing less volunteer work so she can conserve her Hashimoto’s-sapped energy. Now we’re shifting gears: did you know that January is also There Are No Good Men Left Once You’re In Your 60s So Just Settle For Whoever Or You’ll Die Alone Awareness Month? It’s true! And Estelle and Wilbur are going to make you ever more aware of this over the coming weeks, as Estelle forces herself to laugh at Wilbur’s terrible jokes and tries to forget his appalling behavior and just generally unpleasant personality.

Gasoline Alley, 1/20/20

I’m not even going to bother bringing you up to speed on Gasoline Alley, but I am going to say this: if you’ve given one of your characters a “whimsical” name like “Baleen,” I think it’s kind of weird to milk laughs out of other characters finding it strange? I dunno, it just seems kind of overdetermined to me. Long story short, I hope our salty waitress has a long and serious talk with this young man about the difference between baleen whales, which use bony plates to filter food out of the water as it passes through their mouths, and toothed whales like the orca.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/20/20

Back in the days when Woody Wilson wrote this strip, people used to give the Morgans stuff all the time: free tickets to SeaWorld, steeply discounted vacation homes, and so on. But under Terry Beatty’s watch, the gravy train has been slowed somewhat. Sure, June and Rex scored some free toddlers a couple years back, but her best friend had to die to make that happen. Fortunately, the Morgans don’t care about other people’s well-being, really, so Aunt Tildy’s transparent hint that she’s gonna drop dead soon really ought to have June’s ears pricking up. What are they going to get in the will, do you suppose?

Crankshaft, 1/20/20

Man, I am mesmerized by whatever is in Crankshaft’s spoon here. Sure, he could easily make himself some kind of soggy off-brown slurry to eat at home for much less money, but then he wouldn’t be able to trade bon mots with his friends as he chokes the tasteless stuff down, you know?