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Six Chix, 4/15/19

Happy Tax Day, everybody! Six Chix is here to remind you that even beloved cultural icons like the Easter Bunny — seen here with a stack of W-9s, 1099s, and 1040 Schedule Cs, denoting his freelancer status — currently live in the precarious world of the gig economy, where traditional labor protections cannot reach.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/15/19

I was going to do a bit about Hootin’ Holler’s place in a sad, post-apocalyptic universe, based on the local post office’s affiliation with the “Newnited States,” but then I remembered that I already did that back in 2010, so instead I’ll just point out that the IRS considers income from barter and criminal activity to be taxable, so maybe Snuffy shouldn’t be quite so relaxed.

Crock, 4/15/19

Speaking of repeated jokes, I was about to say that I was willing to put aside my feud with Crock and admit that I found this strip unironically funny, but then I remembered I did the same thing when it ran last May. I guess I’ve just validated Crock’s decision to run the few funny strips in its vast archives every eleven months or so, because people will enjoy them and probably won’t remember that they’re repeats unless they really dedicate some thought to it.

Gil Thorp, 4/15/19

Oh, I guess this Gil Thorp plotline is about how student-athletes should stay well-rounded and have outside hobbies, like knitting or blogging. Girl student-athletes, I should specify; obviously boy student-athletes need to dedicate all their energy into Mudlark athletics in a desperate attempt to be in the tiny percentage of high school students recruited into elite collegiate athletic programs, so they can dedicate all their energy during college into sports so they can be in the tiny percentage of elite college athletes who end up in the pros.

Mary Worth, 4/15/19

I like Toby’s big smile as she announces to Mary that “poems can be cribbed off the Internet,” like she’s figured out how to beat Big MFA at their own game. She can’t tell Ian, of course, as it would make him realize his whole career path of sharing the wonders of literature with undergrads is a sham, but she’s gotta tell someone.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/14/19

For a long time, one of my literary pet peeves was when someone spells “trooper” the way panel one does here; in the sense of the phrase as Rex means it, it’s supposed to be “trouper,” as in an acting troupe, and the implication is supposed to be more of an actor’s “the show must go on come what may” than soldierly doggedness. But it’s something I’ve eased up on of late, given that troupe and troop are doublets, the same French word borrowed into English twice three centuries apart, and anyway it’s not like the two senses are that far apart. Anyway, I think we can all agree that throughout this process, Brayden has shown neither a warrior’s courage nor a performer’s flair, so he deserves neither spelling.

Six Chix, 3/14/19

Do you suppose the diagonal squiggly line down the middle of this is supposed to be a panel marker, indicating that our protagonist is devouring all of this stale candy minutes after her dialogue, or the edge of a thought bubble, indicating that she fantasizes doing the same? Either way, I think I think it falls short of the set-up’s potential: we should see her dumping all this chocolate down her gullet right in front of her interlocutors, and we would rightly laud her as a hero for it.

Dennis the Menace, 3/14/19

Mr. Wilson alone dares to speak the shocking truth of the comic-strip reality all of these characters share: no matter how much time passes, they will never age or change, their essential Dennis-ness and Alice-ness and Mr. Wilson-ness and so on set in stone forever. Notice that they don’t even bother putting candles on Dennis’s cake. Dennis … will always be Dennis.

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Mary Worth, 3/12/19

Oh, hey, if you’re wondering where the Estelle/Arthur Z (or, more accurately, Estelle/team of catfishers hanging out in a Kuala Lumpur cybercafe operating the “Arthur Z” SilverDaters account) is at, it’s reached “quoting e e cummings over the phone,” and Estelle is over the moon! The main question I have is if they’ve somehow tricked her into calling into a phone number she has to pay them for, or if they’re doing this toll-free via Skype or whatever and they’re keeping their powder dry for the moment when “Arthur Z” loses his wallet and needs a five-figure sum wired to a Malaysian Western Union office, stat.

Mark Trail, 3/12/19

Meanwhile, in Mark Trail, Cherry’s dad just got a phone call letting him know his old friend died, which means we have six to fifteen weeks of a “Doc confronts his own mortality!” adventure ahead of us. Not sure how they’re going to work Mark blowing up a boat into this but I’m confident they’ll find a way.

Beetle Bailey, 3/12/19

The Wikipedia list of Beetle Bailey supporting characters is invaluable to a scholar of the Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC oeuvre such as myself, but I have problems with some of its takes on the players’ personalities. For instance, Dr. Bonkus (NO REALLY HIS NAME IS “DR. BONKUS”) is described as “Camp Swampy’s loopy staff psychiatrist, whose own sanity is questionable,” but in all the time I’ve been reading the strip he’s never been anything other than a long-suffering straight man to everyone else’s antics. I kind of enjoy the fact that today’s strip takes place in two entirely different locations; it would have been a little shticky if Rocky had pulled out his guitar and delivered this punchline in mid-session, but as it is we can imagine that he just said “Great!” and got off the couch and left without further explanation, leaving Dr. Bonkus behind to sigh heavily and contemplate, not for the first time, just how much he really helps his patients.

The Phantom, 3/12/19

You’d think that when you’ve been raised from birth to be the 21st in a lineal series of mysterious jungle superheroes, you wouldn’t make rookie secret identity mistakes along the lines of “me … uh, I mean, not me, my close personal friend, the hero, who isn’t me at all, heheheheheh [nervous laughter gradually fades out]”

Six Chix, 3/12/19

Congrats to Six Chix for taking its weird foot thing to the next level … indeed, to the highest possible level. Who wouldn’t want to worship a God with such magnificent toes? Truly we are blessed to be formed in His image, foot-wise.

Pluggers, 3/12/19

Ha ha, did you guys know that bears are carnivores and kangaroos are herbivores? I sure hope plugger diner seats are pleather or some other material that’s easy to hose the blood and viscera off of!