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Gil Thorp, 6/15/22

“Look, I’m only asking this because one of my dumb students put me up to it, but: were you guys in the mob or what? It’s ok, you can tell me. I’m not in the mob. I asked to join, but they said no. I didn’t want to do crimes or anything, they just seemed like cool guys to hang out with, from all the movies and everything.”

Mary Worth, 6/15/22

Folks, you know — you know — that I am Mary Worth lifer at this point. Even before the day I first brought the phrase “Wilbur makes an overture” to the world’s attention (the overture, FYI, was to Iris, a romance storyline that began in the year of our lord 2004), I was all in, and remain entirely tangled with this strip on a personal, emotional, and frankly professional level. But the thing is, when they know you need them, they can go to some pretty out-there places, because they know you have no choice to go there with them. Like “Dawn’s boyfriend is going to dump her for a domestic violence victim he met while he was one of her caregivers at the hospital, because they both named their cats after Star Wars characters, also Dawn is out clubbing with random dudes but he doesn’t know and that doesn’t figure into his calculus.” Pretty grim stuff, man! But I’ve got no other options now. I’ve gotta ride this one as far down as it goes.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/15/22

“Oh, and I also did a bunch of extremely illegal things that they’re gonna put me in prison for. That’s gonna put a crimp in my whole crime-fighting career as well, I guess.”

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Mary Worth, 6/12/22

The thing about Mary Worth, the character, as well as Mary Worth, the strip, is that they are both very moralistic in tone but their actual morality is often pretty flexible. One of the very first storylines featured on this blog involved Mary telling her friend Anna to pursue an old flame at her high school reunion, even though he was now married. Fortunately, he turned out to be recently divorced so that he and Anna could almost immediately get married themselves, but the point is that you’d think Mary’s in favor of couples staying together, but Mary might be like “Hmm … what this? A young woman who refers to Princess Leia as ‘Leia Organa’ and quotes from the one of the movies from the new trilogy that normal people stopped thinking about immediately after it ended? She seems like a fine match for Jared! All I have to do now is mention that his current girlfriend is freak-dancing with anyone who asks down at Rock It to speed this process along!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/12/22

Well, we sure were enjoying that storyline for a bit about a guy who wanted to be a superhero, which we think of as a noble pursuit, but then it turns out he was a crazy person, which maybe shouldn’t have been a surprise given the whole “wanted to be a superhero” thing. However, in addition to thinking that you can cure crime with surgery, the Street Sweeper also bought some extremely cheap handcuffs that may have just been part of a “hot cop” costume from Party City, so I think a lot of our philosophical questions are about to get resolved, at gunpoint.

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Mary Worth, 6/4/22

Whenever Jared appears in this strip, he inspires intense loathing in both me and, based on your comments, all of you, and one of the fascinating things about Mary Worth is that it’s never clear if that’s the intended effect. Like, normal people recognize Jared as a needy, petulant, emotionally manipulative “nice guy,” but are we supposed to view him as such, or is he actually just an unappreciated sad sack worthy of love, and worthy of Dawn’s love in particular? Well, I kind of feel like today’s strip, in which Dawn goes clubbing with strange men like a whore while Jared gently consoles a victim of domestic violence, answers the question, and I’m excited that we’re all going to get the outcome we’ve been begging for (Dawn and Jared breaking up) but only because Dawn isn’t good enough for him.

Gil Thorp, 6/4/22

Wow, huh, so we’ve spent this entire spring focused on Gregg’s little blindness problem and finally we have a solution to it: get better glasses. Glasses, everybody! Why didn’t we think of that? You know, weirdly there hasn’t been a girl’s softball B-plot this year, and I think it may be because the Lady Mudlarks are too smart to be in this strip.