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Mary Worth, 5/19/16

So we all know who that could be — it’s Dawn, ready to berate Mary because she took her advice to achieve in-person connecting by making a bolder personal effort and all it got her was a weirdly all-consuming not-relationship with a contingent faculty member and the hatred of all her peers. I’m more interested in the banner DEBATE SCANDAL headline in the Santa Royale News, which appears to be an sixteen-page tabloid. Was one of the candidates for Santa Royale City Council getting illegal advice through an earpiece while debating his opponent down at the old VFW hall? Or did the local high school debate team get busted for using performance-enhancing drugs, which, having been a high school debater myself, I’m not sure what that would even entail. Coffee, maybe?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/19/16

With new writer Terry Beatty in place, Sarah seems destined to do less creepy adult-child stuff, like being groomed for greatness by a mobster and her pet artist, and more normal-child stuff, like frolicking in the yard with her pet dog! I thought maybe this would be setting off another adventure, like when Abbey found a bunch of human skeletons that one time, but nope, just a skunk. I guess we’re going also going to see Sarah doing less succeeding, like when she became a best-selling author and skipped the first grade, and more failing, like when her new classmates at her fancy private school call her “Stinky Sarah” for the next six to ten years.

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Pluggers, 5/18/16

I have very mixed feelings about this caption/cartoon combination. In general, I sneer at shortcuts that allow the artist to pair up an extremely generic cartoon that can be endlessly reused, such as “Chicken Lady dyspeptically looks at a calendar while talking on a landline,” with an extremely specific caption, such as “Chicken Lady has gone past whatever the equivalent of menopause is for monstrous human-avian hybrids.” In this case, though, I’m pretty glad that we haven’t been presented with a visual depiction of, say, Chicken Lady about to get it on with her spouse and gleefully announcing that contraception won’t be necessary, or, conversely, Chicken Lady weeping sadly to herself because she can never have children.

Dennis the Menace, 5/18/16

“Get it, wreck-creation? Like they’re creating wrecks? Wuh-recks. It’s a silent w. I realize now I should’ve thought this through better.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/18/16

I’m so excited to casually drop the phrase “Mistopher Drama” into everyday conversation that I’m almost willing to overlook the fact that the plot of this strip is basically “The Boy Who Cried Child Abuse.”

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Shoe, 5/17/16

As America’s #1 Blogger Who Thinks The Bird-People Of Shoe Should Behave More Like Actual Birds, my immediate reaction upon reading this strip was to Google “can birds digest gluten?” While evidence is inconclusive, by which I mean I couldn’t find anything on the first page of results, I did learn about “angel wing syndrome,” which, according to a web page with disturbing pictures I found on the Internet, is when baby birds eat too much bread because people like to feed bread to adorable baby birds, and as a result their wings don’t develop properly. But are underdeveloped wings only the first stage in the bird de-evolution caused by eating processed carbohydrates? Is this colony of grotesque bird-people, featherèd and beakèd but also clothèd and handèd, simply the result of too much gluten? Is Roz’s customer not a goof on current dietary fads, but rather a brave soul trying to set her children free of the trap from which her generation can never escape?

Crock, 5/17/16

Hey, guys, remember when Crock’s creator’s son decided he didn’t want to do the strip anymore, back in 2012, and there was going to be maybe a couple years of reruns and that was it? Welp, it’s 2016 and Crock is still happening, at least on King Features’ website, and who knows if its in repeats or what. Like, a beeper joke would be about 20 years out of date, but a lot of jokes in Crock seemed 20 years out of date even when new strips were being produced, so! Anyway, assuming this is a repeat, it’s a good example how the passage of time can totally change the effect of a piece of art: whereas in 1995 or whatever the point of this strip would have been “Ha ha, the kids today, they take their beepers with them everywhere,” today it serves as a eulogy for an important technology that was rapidly displaced before it had a chance to become truly ubiquitous.

Hi and Lois, 5/17/16

Irma’s tragedy is that the day when the American suburb was a hotbed of sexual experimentation has long passed, but the ennui of suburban alienation has endured.