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Mary Worth and Judge Parker, 2/15/17

It’s interesting to me that the stereotypical, cartoonish drawing of tears has them coming out of the outer corners of your eyes, when human anatomy ensures that they’re much more likely to come out by our noses in real life. That’s how we know that Iris, with her messy, confusing motivations and emotions, is fully, gloriously human, and “Sophie” actually died in that car wreck and had her brain implanted into an android duplicate by her mysterious kidnapper. Her mysterious kidnapper who … she is maybe talking about today, for the first time? Her programming is malfunctioning!

Funky Winkerbean, 2/15/17

Haha, so, yesterday I joked about how the DMV was going to murder Funky, but today it’s like … it’s going to happen, and he wants them to do it. He’s egging them on. Last week he made his peace with death and now he wants it over with. This is suicide by cop, except it’s suicide by low-level bureaucrat and awful, awful wordplay.

Family Circus, 2/15/17

OH NO JEFFY KILLED A BUSINESS MAN AND RITUALLY STRIPPED HIM OF HIS SACRED GARMENTS TO GAIN HIS TOTEMIC POWER

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Mary Worth, 2/14/17

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY EVERYBODY! The romance addicts over at Mary Worth are celebrating this very special holiday of romantic love by, uh, having one of its characters bawl her eyes out because she just dumped her hot young boyfriend for no good reason. My favorite thing about this strip is that Mary counseled Iris not once but twice on this issue, coming down on the side of “Yeah, you should definitely date a hot young guy if that feels right to you,” and yet seems to have no idea who Iris might be talking about in panel one. Look, Mary is busy, OK? Mary is dealing with someone keeps writing the same letter to Ask Wendy over and over and over again; she can’t be expected to keep track of which hot young dudes her neighbors may or may not be currently fucking.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/14/17

Rex Morgan is still spinning a tale about selling old horror comics at Comic-Con, which, boring, but I guess the strip remembered it’s supposed to do medical stuff at least occasionally? So, here it is: red-hot dehydration action! You’ll beg for more old horror comics sales!

Funky Winkerbean, 2/14/17

Funky spent all last week at his lawyer’s office making out his will and spiraling into endless anxiety about his upcoming death. Today he learned exactly how he’s going to meet his demise: he accidentally let his driver’s license expire, so the DMV is going to murder him. Not a moment too soon, in my opinion!

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Slylock Fox, 2/13/17

I can’t remember where I read it now, but there’s a line in a review of Rogue One that I liked, discussing Darth Vader’s appearance. This is the first film where David Prowse didn’t play the body of the character, and the reviewer said that in the new movie Spencer Wilding, the new actor, looked and moved differently, so “he just looked to me like a guy in a Darth Vader costume, which, I suppose, is what he was.” Don’t we all, in essence, play-act the roles in life we aim to inhabit, uncertain of when the moment will come when we finally make them our own? And isn’t this made more difficult when someone else is so strongly associated with the job? It might’ve been the dogs, with nostalgia for their now vanquished nemeses, who explained to the other animals the utility of the postal service after the beasts took over; and, like all the creatures trying to ape the infrastructure of human society, this mailbear is doing the best he can. But it’s his hesitancy, his sense that he’s not really a postal worker, that he’s just a bear wearing an XXL uniform torn off a long-ago-eviscerated H. sapiens letter carrier, that Shady Shrew is exploiting here. Who’s to say that he isn’t in disguise, after all? Who’s to say that they aren’t all going through a vaguely absurd pantomime of their vanquished betters, with their bowler caps and trench coats and magnifying glasses?

Dick Tracy, 2/13/17

Meanwhile, over at Dick Tracy’s heist plot, the Brush, a man with a freakish shock of hair coming down from his forehead and completely covering his face, is about to change out of his landscaper’s uniform and into a security guard’s uniform, two disguises that will definitely let him blend in undetectably and not draw any attention to himself whatsoever.

Dennis the Menace, 2/13/17

I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Mr. Wilson is planning to murder Dennis — he’s old, he’s lived a long life and there isn’t much left to it, prison and the electric chair don’t scare him, etc. — but it’s pretty shocking to see him admit it so openly to his wife.

Marvin, 2/13/17

I spend a lot of time grappling with the horror of Marvin’ endless poop jokes, but it’s only with today’s strip that I feel like I get the rationale behind them: apparently they’re part of some misguided Freudian belief that we’d all be better adjusted if we didn’t have to obey society’s oppressive rules about going to the bathroom in a toilet and just, like, shat whenever, man, you’re not the boss of me and my gastrointestinal tract.

Pluggers, 2/13/17

Pluggers’ dreams of a sex-robot companion became a lot more attainable once they realized that due to their age and general physical decrepitude they had lost interest in sex a long time ago.