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Mary Worth, 1/27/24

Remember when Keith first showed up in this strip as a closed-off, taciturn man who tried to get through his interactions with Mary with as few words as possible? And now here he is waxing rhapsodic about all the new feelings he’s been experiencing or whatever. I have to imagine that if you went back in time and showed the Keith of late September what he’s become that he’d be a million times more embarrassed than if he’d “gone woke” and just enjoyed a vegan burger or something.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/27/24

“Jimmy — is that you? My old friend, who came up with the ‘Jimmy Seminar,’ a self-improvement method that I blatantly ripped off to create the Ollman Technique? And who I spotted just a few days ago, panicked, and then ran over with my car? That Jimmy?”

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Judge Parker, 1/24/24

Oh, yeah, so it turns out that the long lost Parker sister is in fact a scam artist — not, to be clear, that she’s only pretending to be the long lost Parker sister, but rather that after leaving the comforts of the Parker home, she became a master of scamming, if Detective Yelich’s instant judgement of a picture of a fake ID that Alan quickly grabbed out of Ann’s purse while she was in the bathroom is to be believed. Anyway, today’s second panel is very funny, to me, as we can imagine the emotional rollercoaster this 1950s snob salesman caricature will endure when the credit card charges for this expensive (?) dress are inevitably reversed.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/24/24

Oh, yeah, so it turns out Rene survived his terrible car accident thanks to Rex’s quick intervention but he’ll be in traction for months. Tragically, it also seems that he’s now permanently stuck in mid-sarcastic eye roll, just like his mother always warned him.

Mark Trail, 1/24/24

Oh, yeah, so it turns out Mark organized a big fishing retreat to help men bond and get in touch with their feelings and each other. But he still didn’t bring Rusty, ha ha! Anyway, you know who really isn’t going to enjoy this is the fish, who will be killed and eaten.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/7/24

Oh my goodness, Rene’s reign of grifting terror is finally at an end, stopped once and for all by the deliberate and heroic efforts of our protagonists some random guy hitting him with a car. Remember, in the Morganverse, a pedestrian getting run over results not in death but in selective amnesia, so I look forward to seeing how his personality gets rebuilt better than before, possibly with the help of the Lyle Ollman’s patented Mirakle Method™.

Curtis, 1/7/24

A longtime and beloved Curtis bit is that Curtis enjoys cracking wise about the elaborate hats worn by the ladies in his congregation. Part of the bit is that Barry, despite enjoying the quips, always begs him to stop, and today we finally learn why: having angered the Church leadership with their antics, the brothers have now been excommunicated, expelled from the community and forever cut off from God’s grace. Look for a future strip where Derek and “Onion” ask Curtis “Hey, ‘Wimp-kins,’ why the long face?” and he replies “Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God and tasted the eternal joys of heaven, am not tormented with ten thousand hells in being deprived of everlasting bliss?”

Daddy Daze, 1/7/24

We’re all on the same page about the Daddy Daze baby’s “ba”s actually just being nonsense babble and the Daddy Daze daddy is working out his own interior emotional turmoil when he projects meaning on to them, right? I think today’s strip neatly illustrates the process: something deep the Daddy Daze daddy’s half-awake mind has conjured up a truly nightmarish body horror scenario, which he puts into the mouth of his son, and then his higher consciousness works to transmute this grotesque image into something much more pedestrian: an anxious metaphor about the imposter syndrome that he assumes all adults share. The way he has to speak all this aloud really drives home the fact that he’s got the worst recorded case of bicameral mind since the Bronze Age.

Dick Tracy, 1/7/24

Look, I get that Dick Tracy is at least 15 to 20 percent old timey pop culture references by volume, but I feel like naming two characters after the actors who played the Second and Third Doctors on Doctor Who but you add a letter to one of the names and also don’t make the characters look anything like them is less of an “old timey pop culture reference” and more “ah shit ah shit I need to come up with a couple names for people for this storyline, uh uh uh uh uh”.

Dennis the Menace, 1/7/24

Pretty sure that “a little dehydrated” is the euphemism publicists use describe their celebrity clients who are obviously drunk or high in public, so Dennis’s little game here is the least of the menace on display.

Family Circus, 1/7/24

Don’t be sad, Mr. Snowman! That hot chocolate would hollow you out from the inside within seconds, leaving you to die screaming on the kitchen floor! You’re better off alone outside!