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Comment of the Week

Is Dr. Jeff's 'again’ meant to indicate that he's already (willfully?) forgotten what Mary's told him, or does it display his belief that Wilbur's life is a karmic circle of disasters that are superficially varied but basically the same thing happening to him over and over?

—Pozzo
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Rex doing some quick math on how much it’ll cost to haul this stuff to the junkyard

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/11/16

Wow, we’ve gotten to the “people give Rex free stuff” phase of this storyline much more quickly than anticipated! This nice old lady simply must vacate her charming Victorian home, and all her carefully curated possessions will simply clash with her daughter’s charming modernist home. And setting up an estate sale will just be a huge bother. So much easier to simply hand them off to whatever handsome doctor wanders in off the street! Now, let’s go upstairs and let me show you the “birthing chamber.” You can still see the placenta stains on the floor!

Blondie, 3/11/16

Uh, guys, have you seen Blondie’s waist? If she lost seven pounds in a week, you’d notice, because she’d probably be in the hospital.

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The Bum Boat’s elderly clientele makes for a sparse Yelp page

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Mary Worth, 3/10/16

You’d think that after eleven and a half years of literally commenting on soap opera comic strips for a living, I’d be inured to their narrative quirks by now, but honestly, it never gets old to me how weird they are. Years ago somebody told me that continuity strips are written so that people who only read them two or three times a week (i.e., most people who read them, probably) can still follow the storylines more or less, which explains the glacial pacing, the constant repetition of points, and straight-up time-filling strips like today’s, in which Mary and Jeff take time out to explain to one of the Bum Boat’s employees how much they love the Bum Boat. It’s the sort of weird dialogue that in another context I would assume was paid product placement; but, of course, no actual restaurant would bother to pay for placement in Mary Worth, though a restaurant that did might be so cluelessly marketed that it would be named something like “the Bum Boat.” Anyway, Jerry is no doubt tired of Jeff and Mary’s shtick, but he knows he’s got to hide his contempt if he wants that sweet, sweet 12.5% tip.

Crankshaft, 3/10/16

Let’s ignore the ostensible plot action here and just focus on how delightfully angry Rose looks in panel one. She probably only has the vaguest idea of what’s going on or who this young woman is, but that isn’t stopping her from thinking “Fuck these people. Fuck all of these people.”

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Extremely grim Wednesday

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Wizard of Id, 3/9/16

Your occasional reminder that one of the bits of medieval cultural flotsam Wizard of Id makes comedic hay out of is torture! Remember, torture was an omnipresent fact of like in the Middle Ages, and since the Wizard of Id is a 100% accurate depiction of medieval life, it would be narrative malpractice to not have torture jokes. Shoutout to today’s strip for really going all in on the details! The bellows in panel one shows you the technology that was once used by the state to literally inscribe its power onto its subjects. The Spook is usually pretty chill about his eternal imprisonment, but as he dangles from the wall in the background, he looks genuinely terrified about what’s about to happen. And the smoke wafting up from the red-hot iron, demonstrating the world of agony that’s about to be “communicated” to the hapless prisoner — mercy! Wholesome laughs all around!

Family Circus, 3/9/16

Bad news, Jeffy: once you’re done with childhood, intrusive thoughts about your inevitable death start on your birthday, not the next morning.