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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/26/17

Oh, hey, what’s been going on in Rex Morgan, M.D.? A lot of boring blah blah about how Kelly and Niki don’t get to spend a lot of time together because of their after-school jobs (babysitting an amnesiac and delivering pizzas, respectively), and then Niki delivered a pizza to this girl’s house and she got real chatty with him. The whole time I thought she was supposed to be Nancy, Kelly’s nemesis (and, I think, rival for Niki’s affections?) but no, she’s just some other blonde who’s trying to steal Kelly’s man, I guess. A blonde art school nerd to boot. God, remember when Niki was a sullen petty thief with dumb hair? Remember when Kelly was a hot, sassy goth with a dangerous punk rocker boyfriend? Now Niki’s standing here in his chump-ass polyester pizza uniform half-assedly flirting with an aspiring commercial illustrator while Kelly’s off somewhere, I dunno, wearing a lame sweater or something. Still, we have to look towards the future, and the future I particularly am looking forward to involves Niki going with this young lady to see her classmates’ production of Snuffy Smith: The Musical.

Gasoline Alley, 4/26/17

Meanwhile, Gasoline Alley’s incredibly boring “Chipper gives a speech at the PA meeting” storyline is wrapping up in a fashion that definitely isn’t changing the mind of anyone who suspects that the strip has somehow become the main way that the AAPA communicates with its members. Anyway, if anyone wants to take a jaunt to Vegas next month, you could see a bunch of physician’s assistants lose lots of money at the craps tables, probably!

Funky Winkerbean, 4/26/17

Remember, one of the iron laws of the Funkyverse is that everyone has to be simultaneously as smug and as passive-aggressive as possible about everything. Can’t wait for Cindy to head over to a refugee camp to tell the kids there, “Wow, it looks like you have it pretty easy compared to a second-rate actor whose only crime was loving Stalin a little too much.”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/13/17

Oh, hey, guys, remember Edward? When we last saw him he was a cruel bully who dared to mock Sarah’s art but then she turned the tables and raised up a rebellion against him. Anyway, it appears that, like all powerful bullies who have been humiliated in front of their erstwhile victims, Edward immediately reformed his evil ways and is now a defender of the downtrodden. This is an entirely realistic outcome that will prevent Sarah from being beaten to death with her own crutches on her first day of public school! Instead, she has acquired yet another powerful protector, and the fact that she doesn’t remember the unpleasant origin story of their friendship will honestly just make everything less socially awkward for everybody involved.

Marvin, 4/13/17

Ha ha, it’s another Marvin about the romantic/sexual lives of literal infants! But you know what’s grosser than that? A comic about the romantic/sexual lives of literal infants where a potential romantic/sexual relationship between two literal infants faces a barrier, and that barrier is that one of the infants still voids his bladder and bowels into his pants indiscriminately, while the other has learned to wait and go in a toilet. And you know what’s grosser than that? It’s when a baby is describing all this horror, and Marvin gives a knowing smile to the audience, like, “Oh yeah, we’ve all been there. Liking a girl but she doesn’t shit her pants like you do. Right? Right? This is extremely relatable content.”

Funky Winkerbean, 4/13/17

Can you imagine if what you had to do in order to coax your spouse into sex was to say, “OK, stop writing yet another book about your dead wife so we can fu–NO! DON’T YOU DARE FALL ASLEEP ON ME! GOD DAMN IT!”

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Blondie, 4/8/17

So, confession: usually when I make a joke about being an old person who doesn’t understand the apps the young people like, I joke about Yik Yak, which has a dumb name and also hasn’t exactly set the world on fire, but what really makes me panic is Snapchat, a wildly popular app/messaging service (?)/content consumption platform (???) that I honestly could not even begin to tell you how it works or what using it is like. Still, I’m one step ahead of the folks who make Blondie, since I was already pretty sure that it works only on phones, not computers, which a quick visit to their baffling and terrifying website seems to confirm.

Having said all that, I don’t want to neglect the powerful and chilling core message of this strip, which is: this generation is so enamored with the idea of information being ephemeral that they’ve lost touch with the visceral world of matter. Dagwood destroys. Dagwood consumes. What once was, Dagwood makes not. If you’re not terrified, you should be.

Mark Trail, 4/8/17

One thing I definitely like in a kidnapper is that he takes an interest in the people he kidnaps. Like mostly they just throw you in the trunk of a car and hold you for ransom, but not this fellow! He wants to know Mark’s whole deal! What’s your name? What brings you to Rapid City, the city famous for people getting rapidly kidnapped at the airport the minute you get off the plane? It’s the final panel that really does it for me, though. “Oh, you’re going to the Indian reservation? Why? Are you some kind of writer or something? Just another white guy with a journalism degree looking to indulge your stereotype of a noble, vanishing people and write a 6,000 word pseudo-literary feature for some Condé Nast publication, where your kill fee is higher than the average annual income on the rez? You people make me sick.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/8/17

“I’m only going to say this one: We’re sending Sarah to public school because it’ll be better for her, OK? Not because we’re poor. Got it? Don’t you dare even think that.”