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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.”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/5/17

The extremely slo-mo amnesia-driven retconning of Sarah Morgan, which is so very slo-mo that it only serves to highlight the fact that the retconning is happening, continues apace, and I guess we’re going to keep discovering how far back a year of comic strip time actually goes. Say, remember like three years ago in real-world time, when Sarah caught her babysitter Kelly fooling around with her boyfriend, and used that discovery to blackmail her into servitude? Sarah doesn’t! Sarah doesn’t remember it at all! Sarah can’t understand why all the adults around her treat her with mingled fear and disgust!

Gasoline Alley, 4/5/17

If I had to say what Gasoline Alley’s mission is, I guess it would be to relentlessly promote folksiness in all its forms, including folksy expressions that nobody ever says, like “It takes 50¢ to get you started and $5.00 to make you stop!” But the lady at the far right of the second panel is taking this far too literally. Reg hasn’t even started yet but she’s already implying that she would pay a handsome sum just to get him to shut up! It’s like tipping a stripper, only instead of showing appreciation for Reg’s dancing prowess and hot body, the only thing she “appreciates” is Reg not talking any more! Seems kind of rude, in my opinion.