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Mary Worth, 4/21/23

I’m not at all a person who’s in favor of repressing one’s feelings, but Wilbur is openly weeping in front of you, Mary! I don’t think he needs the language of song to help him fully express his emotions! He just needs some tissues so he doesn’t get snot all over your upholstery.

Dennis the Menace, 4/21/23

I dunno, Dennis, you appear to have put on a shirt and tie to set the mood for the single guest your mother invited over, so I’m going to actually guess that you’re in the top decile of manners for six-year-olds nationwide.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/21/23

Ha ha, look at Yvonne’s face in that second panel, that’s a woman who’s trying so hard to not just blurt out “SO ARE YOU EVER GOING TO SING ‘MUDDY BOOTS’ AGAIN OR WHAT”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/20/23

One of my little life problems is that I have an absolutely terrible memory for names, which as you can imagine is often embarrassing, because I can usually remember a lot of other stuff about a person I’ve met a few times, to the extent that we’re talking and hitting it off and it’s no longer socially acceptable for me to not know their name, frankly. I experience this same problem with characters in newspaper comic strips, and take it from me, it’s quite hard to Google the names of people in newspaper comic strips, especially when (a) you don’t know their name and have to work from descriptions like “guy in Rex Morgan, M.D., whose dad is a horror comics artist” and (b) the deepest archive of textual material online about newspaper comic strips is on a blog that you yourself write, and you often find several entries where you wrote about the character whose name you’re trying to find in a way that makes it very clear that you couldn’t remember the name back then either and ended up writing around it.

This is a long way of saying that I do appreciate that Hank and Yvonne keep introducing themselves to Fergus, but: I’ve got it, now! They can stop! It’s just getting weird, honestly! I guarantee you that even though Mud appears to have retained their last name, he only thinks of Yvonne as “the woman who will not shut up about ‘Muddy Boots.’”

Hi and Lois, 4/20/23

Guys, the CSI franchise is very much on CBS. Were there no HBO shows you could think of for this gag? Sopranos Street? Sesame Succession? Does Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC not pay its jokesmiths enough to afford premium cable?

Dennis the Menace, 4/20/23

Ha ha, just a little light demonic possession! I judge this: pretty menacing.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/18/23

Oh no, Hank Jr. must either give in to that nagging feeling he has about “Dr. Mirakle” and follow that thread no matter how far it goes or what kind of seedy underworld of fraud and violence it takes him to, or he could forget all about it and go back to his cabin and fool around with his wife. Sounds like a tough choice, I know, but keep in mind that if he “solves” the Dr. Mirakle caper, absolutely nobody will give a shit, so clearly that’s the route he’s going to take.

Marvin, 4/18/23

Every once in a while they make an “old guys doing crimes” movie with beloved older actors, like Tough Guys (1986, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas) or Going In Style (2017, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, and Alan Arkin), along with probably some other ones in the intervening 30 years that I’m forgetting. These movies are never really big hits but there’s a built-in audience, which is to say old people, and since old people are also the most important audience for newspaper comics, Marvin could definitely do worse than have a whole subplot where Roy and Bernie’s new friend Earl pulls them into a life of crime, providing a kind of thrill in their later years that they thought they’d never recapture. Or, you know, the strip could instead have one joke about a guy who can’t stop wearing a ski mask, ha ha, then it’s right back into the poop jokes.

Mary Worth, 4/18/23

Dr. Ed is out here proving that you don’t have to follow annoying technicalities like “labor law” when you GOT THAT GOOD DICK