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Mary Worth, 5/5/21

Say what you will about this “Drew the dissatisfied Instadoc” storyline, but it’s been hard to predict its twists and turns! Like, is Drew going to be bamboozled? Seduced? Will Ashlee actually become the next Bella Hadid, with Drew as her svengali along for the ride? Anyway, based on today’s strip I’m foreseeing an extremely exciting sequence of events, where Drew has to cancel because of a work thing, and then Ashlee gets miffed and passive aggressively fails to follow up to schedule a new photoshoot and eventually quietly unfollows him, and then like three months later Drew thinks, “Wow, remember Ashlee? She was pretty but I guess some things aren’t meant to be.” This will take eight to eleven months.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/5/21

What sort of wonderful surprises can increasingly unavoidable Rex Morgan recurring character Buck Wise deliver to our heroes? Could he, say, use his industry connections to arrange a meeting between Sarah and her favorite author? Ha ha, no, of course not. That would be absurd. He could make sure her fan letter gets actually read, though! Or at least he could tell her that it would get actually read, which from her point of view would probably end up amounting to the same thing.

Shoe, 5/5/21

I’ve spent more time than I care to admit trying to figure out the whole deal with Skyler and the Perfesser’s relationship, which I now regret as today’s strip makes it pretty clear that relationship is entirely transactional.

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Mary Worth, 5/2/21

I am honestly not sure where this is going, by which I mean that I am honestly not sure how stupid we’re supposed to think Dr. Drew is! Like, is this a transparent flirtation, with the unlikely “Oh, your amateur photography will be like your medical mission!” pitch just the flimsiest possible pretext to exchange phone numbers as a prelude to boning? Juliette Binoche’s quote up top seems to imply this! On the other hand, Drew is quite dumb, so it’s possible that he’s taken Ashlee’s words to heart and now thinks that there’s more than one way to heal: you can do it with a scalpel, or with a camera and the full set of Instagram filters. This will lull him into a false sense of complacency when Ashlee lures him to the remote, picturesque waterfall where her accomplices will harvest his organs, which will allow him to heal a number of fabulously wealthy Russian oligarchs and/or Gulf emirs, when you think about it.

Marvin, 5/2/21

Wow, Marvin just had the craziest, most unlikely dream: his family wanted to spend time with him! Oh, and he also violated various copyrights held by Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc., I guess.

Shoe, 5/2/21

GOD DAMN IT ROZ YOU’RE A BIRD

EVERYONE IN THIS STRIP IS A BIRD

YOU’VE GOT FEATHERS IN YOUR DRAIN, ROZ

NOT HAIR, FEATHERS

GOD DAMN IT

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Shoe, 3/21/21

You have to respect the absolute dedication that went into the production of today’s Shoe. For instance, someone at the syndicate presumably informed whoever thought up the joke that, no, society has not degraded so much that we can just print “cover your ass” in our talking bird funny-strip in mainstream newspapers. Did that deter them from soldiering on, even though the bowdlerized version of the phrase isn’t in common use at all? No, no it did not. Then, presumably, there came a point where the artist realized that, due to the long-established character design and the viewing angle chosen for the second panel of the strip, Shoe and the Perfesser’s tail feathers would be clearly visible. Now, you’re probably asking yourself: are the tail feathers themselves the analogue to the “ass” (or “rear”) of the common phrase, or do they themselves do the work of covering one’s ass/rear (which in this interpretation is the cloaca, I guess)? An interesting philosophical question, to be sure, but either answer renders the whole joke completely and obviously pointless. And yet, nevertheless, the Shoe creative team persisted. I for one think that’s beautiful, in its own way.

Family Circus, 3/21/21

One of the fundamental problems with long-running franchises and “cinematic universes” is that each new individual story adds a layer of canon that must be taken into account by future stories, and while I like to argue about Star Trek chronology and uniform design as much as the next nerd, I have come to sympathize with how this restricts the freedom of storytellers to produce an engaging narrative. That said, there are some lines that I feel strongly should not be crossed, no matter how entertaining the result. For instance, if there’s one thing we know from reading the Family Circus for decades, it’s that Jeffy does not understand the concept of object permanence.