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Mary Worth, 9/4/23

Folks! Mary Worth is taking a moment off from her tale of old people engaging in state-sanction monogamy in order to acknowledge that Hot Labor Summer is here and she is all in favor of it. Whether you’re a Hollywood celeb member of SAG-AFTRA or a hotel maid organized by Unite Here, Mary is happy to come to your picket line with delicious muffins, bottled water, and personal-sized bottles of sunscreen.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/4/23

Snuffy Smith, on the other hand? Snuffy absolutely supplements his chicken-stealing and moonshining revenue by occasionally signing up with the Pinkertons to help crack some skulls if the miners in the next holler over get a little too big for their britches.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/4/23

Rex Morgan, meanwhile, is focusing on the complex modern-day economy that complicates the traditional division between labor and capital and leaves various independent contractors and entrepreneurs entangled in their attempts to extract ongoing revenues from intellectual property. I’m kind of sad that we never got to see the conversation between Mud and Buzzy Cameron where Buzzy explains that they need to set up a trust account for Rene’s rightful share of his music revenues, in case the court decides to award it to his many victims or whatever.

Shoe, 9/4/23

What’s the age cutoff for a heterosexual woman who unselfconsciously refers to a platonic female friend as a “girlfriend”? 40? 50? Anyway, it’s too bad nobody younger than whatever age that is reads newspaper comics, because they might be briefly intrigued, though ultimately disappointed, by the idea that Shoe is about a pansexual bird polycule.

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Hi and Lois, 9/2/23

If you want a glimpse of how in mid-century America, syndicated newspaper cartooning used to be your ticket to a comfortable life, consider the central position the great suburban participatory leisure sports of golf and tennis hold in our legacy strips! It’s a different time now, but these strips can still teach us a lot about the folkways of suburban Connecticut and similar communities, and if I’m reading today’s Hi and Lois right, those places are on the verge of civil war. Hi thinks he can just ride this one out on the golf course, but there will come a time, and soon, where he’ll have to take a side.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/2/23

Oh ho, it looks like Rene, aka “Professor Mirakle,” is back to tie up some loose ends, possibly by murdering his erstwhile disciple Mud! Ha ha, everyone will be real sorry they didn’t accept his apologies, once they find his bullet-ridden corpse in this hotel room three days from now! Honestly, though, it seems much more likely that Rene is just trying to get a cut of the money from Mud’s apparently quite lucrative Li’l Fergus character and the songs he co-wrote and/or inspired through fake guru powers. It would be funny to see an attempted murderer make use of the legal system to enforce his intellectual property claims, but honestly, it’s not like he hasn’t done it before.

Between Friends, 9/2/23

Sorry to this lady who is being abandoned by all her friends and family, but I will never get over the phrase “We live in a global world.” Do we? Is it a global world we live in? Is it really? Is that why you can use a globe to depict the world with such uncanny accuracy?

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/30/23

I guess Mud Mountain Murphy’s apology tour has now become Mud Mountain Murphy’s relentless attempt to extract forgiveness from Truck, which isn’t exactly in the spirit of humility and self-abnegation that Professor Mirakle preached, I don’t think. Mud has apparently decided to check in at the Glenwood Hotel, which is where Truck sheltered in place after contracting some kind of not-COVID respiratory virus in the spring of 2020. It’s a real shithole, which is why it was the perfectly depressing setting for a roots country tune that went unpredictably viral, which ironically means that, despite being in better financial straits, Truck feels honor-bound to just live there permanently now. Anyway, I can’t remember if the owner was originally one Glenwood’s surprisingly large contingent of roots country maniacs before all this happened; I’d like to imagine that he was more a classic rock guy, or maybe into Motown, but was compelled to get way into the roots country scene after his establishment got RootsTok famous, which would explain both his pompadour/sideburns lewk and his clear knowledge of the Mud-Truck feud’s current status.

Six Chix, 8/30/23

I love that this dog is derisively telling his owner to “tell it to the postman, dude.” The Postal Service is of course the mortal enemy of the canine race, and a dog can imagine no better way to degrade you than to suggest that you voluntarily interact with one of its employees.