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Mary Worth, 11/3/17

OK, I know I touched on this briefly before, but for real, I went back and checked, and there have been literally only two Mary Worth plots since the great Zak-Iris romance of late ’16/early ’17: “Dawn The Accidental Summer-Internship Adulterer” and “The Sexy, Dangerous Cruise,” and neither of them by their own internal logic could have taken more than a few weeks of in-strip time. That means that we’re expected to believe that Zak spent maybe a summer developing his game and then getting enough venture funding to build a company around it. This is theoretically possible, but it sure doesn’t speak well of his business acumen that he chose to give both his game and his company a name that sounds like “Zak? Ick!”

Dennis the Menace, 11/3/17

A little kid gushing about how pretty his mom is in vaguely Oedipal fashion? Kinda menacing. A little kid learning pick-up artist techniques from Reddit and “negging” his mom? MENACE LEVELS OFF THE CHARTS

Six Chix, 11/3/17

“He’s a gross young man and I spend as little time with him as possible!”

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Pluggers, 11/2/17

Ooh, we have another Extremely Depressing Pluggers entry to go toe-to-toe with the all-time Extremely Depressing Pluggers champion, “Rhino-Man Hocks His TV!” Do you think today’s entry is meant to actually depict acute poverty, or just a mindset imposed by constant low-level deprivation on our chicken-lady, so that even though she could probably part with the dollar or so that a new half-pound block of cream cheese costs, she thinks that she isn’t worthy of such extravagance, and that whatever mild-to-not-quite-urgent-care-level digestive distress she experiences is just her lot in life and she deserves no better? Either way, it’s still pretty grim.

Gasoline Alley, 11/2/17

Oh, hey, it’s Rufus and Joel, America’s third- or fourth-favorite fake old-timey comic strip rustics! They’ve been separated ever since Rufus wandered off with a broken heart, and Joel’s quest to find him passed through various other comic strips before arriving at … the circus? Sure, why not. Anyway, while they were apart, Rufus took part in the some of the unspeakably depraved orgies for which circus folk are famous, and he would now like some hard liquor post-haste.

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Gil Thorp, 11/1/17

OH SNAP IT’S THE SHOCKING MID-SEASON GIL THORP TWIST!!! See, we all thought Rick was going to get a concussion like his Uncle Gary was so worried about, but nope, he just got a “classic” sprained ankle, “classic” because that’s the sort of injury football players used to get, back when men were men, you know? Nobody complained about poor widdle babies getting concussions back in the day, probably because people were tougher and hadn’t been pussified by liberals and feminism, or maybe because concussions and brain injuries were harder to diagnose with older medical techniques and thousands suffered for reasons they never fully understood, who can say. Anyway, the good news is, while a traumatic brain injury would probably interfere with Rick’s promising YouTube singing career, a sprained ankle will only serve as a solid gimmick to help him stand out from the pack as “Gimpy Golden-Voiced Rick Soto, Modern-Day Crooner.”

Mary Worth, 11/1/17

In Iris’s cold calculus, a man can be hot, rich, age-appropriate, and/or Wilbur, and he needs to match at least two of those qualities to be her boyfriend. So, good news for Zak! He seems so different now, possibly because they’ve entered some murky parallel dimension where everything is purple and also traditional morals and values are inverted and Mary will advise her to definitely link herself to the sexy game-designing millionaire and convince him to cash in before the stock inevitably tanks.

Mark Trail, 11/1/17

LITTLE KNOWN FACT: When “black box” devices are recovered from crashed aircraft, more 90 percent of the time the final words recorded in the cockpit are “It is getting harder to control the plane!”