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Mary Worth, 9/1/24

Hey guys! Sorry I didn’t keep you up to date on the big drama at the Santa Royale Veterinarians Convention, which is that Dr. Ed ran into his ex Shiela and Estelle experienced a frission of jealousy about it. I know you’re all very emotionally invested in the Ed/Estelle relationship (or E/E, as its known in the fandom) and didn’t want to leave you with your feelings all up in the air about it! But don’t worry: today we’ve definitively established that Shiela is Dr. Ed’s former girlfriend, but they’re just good friends now. They each found partners better suited to them! And that goodness for that!

Panels from Slylock Fox, 9/1/24

This has got to be a real downer for the intelligent animals of Slylock Fox: they successfully rose up and overthrew humanity’s domination, but only had a couple decades at the top before a massive asteroid strike wiped out their ecosystem. Their rule was so brief that whatever sapient species eventually evolves from tiny sea lice in a billion years or so probably won’t even notice it in the paleontological record.

Panels from Beetle Bailey, 9/1/24

You ever think about how your bed has to work to support your weight while you’re asleep, and that what you consider to be the restful part of your day is actually when your bed suffers the most? Why would Beetle Bailey, whose title character is truly the patron saint of sloth, be the one to bring us this terrible information?

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Slylock Fox, 8/19/24

Slylock is not alarmed because he knows about the square cube law, which dictates that this unnaturally enlarged mosquito’s body will not be able to support his own weight and he will soon die as his respiratory and circulatory systems collapse. We can only pray that Weirdly’s mechanical tinkering with the bug’s brain wiped away his conscious mind so that he doesn’t have to experience the excruciating process.

Mary Worth, 8/19/24

Remember Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus? Well, get ready for the upcoming Ed-Estelle wedding plotline, Veterinarians Think About Sad Dogs Who Want More Pills All Day, While Unpaid Veterinarian Assistants Spiral Into Bridezilla Mania And Possibly Set The Stage For Actual Fightfights At Their Weddings. I’m tentatively into it!

Gasoline Alley, 8/19/24

Sure, you might say that blogging about comics is “pretty easy all things considered” and “not a real job,” but have you considered the untold psychic damage I take every day, for your amusement, as any number of insane comics details burrow permanently into my brain? For instance, years from now, when my mind has turned to soup and I have forgotten the name and face of everyone I ever loved, I guarantee that if you visit me in whatever facility I’m warehoused in and whisper “Chief Meowrice” into my ear, the correct neuron sequence will fire and my mind’s eye will be presented with the image of this horrible French cat advertising pitchman. If I’m lucky, the experience will kill me.

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The Phantom, 8/18/24

A fun running bit in The Phantom is that we sometimes see original Phantom creator Lee Falk going about his day in pre-war Manhattan, musing about whatever direction the Phantom storyline is going to go in next. This can cause minor issues when it comes to suspension of disbelief, since the Phantom clearly takes place in the 21st century; I buy that Falk could’ve dreamed up plutocrats with their own private rocket companies, though independent post-colonial African states seems a bit more of a stretch. However, I have a harder time believing that our comics scribe neither keeps copies of his own strips nor subscribes to the newspapers that print them and needs help remembering plot points from a few days ago. I guess we really lost something when we replaced friendly one-man newspaper stand businesses with the Internet, although the Internet would also be happy to show Lee Falk last week’s strip, if he asked.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 8/18/24

This is in fact a repeat of a mystery that ran back in June of 2022. However, it’s been redrawn and recolored and — crucially, to establish the much worse vibes — has had dialogue added to show that Slylock has decied to dispense with even the flimsy pretense of rule of law that Forest Kingdom cops operate under and is about to dish out a brutal extrajudicial beating on his shrew nemesis.