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Mary Worth, 8/21/15

One of the complaints about the modern-day movie industry is that studios don’t seem to produce midrange movies anymore; everything is either a tiny indie film made on a shoestring or a huge blockbuster action movie or broad comedy. Mary Worth, as usual, steps up to fill the market that Hollywood is ignoring. Sure, the strip provides big hits like Aldomania or Wilbur’s Illegitimate Not-Son; but it also provides smaller, quieter, but still utterly engrossing plots like Ian Kisses Up To His Boss And Toby Remembers She’s An Artist And They Seethe At Each Other About It. I am hooked and I am not ashamed to admit it!

Anyway, today we learn that Toby’s art show, which features a range of greyscale blobs and quadragons, is downtown, and I’m really glad to see the local artist community is helping gentrify a neighborhood that used to be a dangerous hellhole. Maybe it’ll soon be safe enough for even Mary to go there! Meanwhile, Ian realizes that he’ll have to choose between sitting through a boring and presumably outdated lecture from Hilton Berkes about whatever subject he used to specialize in before he took a cushy administrative job and going to Toby’s show and hopefully seeing that warrior in the background of panel once coming to life and murdering everybody.

Heathcliff, 8/21/15

Heathcliff sure had been into surfing jokes lately, huh? Yes, what if a cat were a surfer. And some aliens saw him. And the aliens were also surfers. That would be truly radical, and also whimsical, would it not? God, this makes me exhausted just looking at it.

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Apartment 3-G, 8/20/15

Welp, looks like I was right! Eric is indeed Margo’s long-thought-dead almost fiance. This is a potentially fascinating plot point from 2009-era Apartment 3-G, which is too bad because this is 2015-era Apartment 3-G so it’ll just lie there like a dead fish and go nowhere. Probably there won’t be any details revealed! Why did Tim grieve for Margo? Did he live in the avalanche but everyone else in the world died? It would explain a lot about the ghostly, dream-like quality of life in this strip.

Mary Worth, 8/20/15

Mary Worth, though! Mary Worth is a strip that continues to fire on all cylinders, awesome as ever. Behold, Toby sullenly dumping milk onto a plate full of Splak® brand breakfast slurry! Gasp as Ian appears to absent-mindedly wrench the refrigerator door from its hinges with the strength of his lowland gorilla kin! Ahhhhh yeah, that’s the stuff.

Spider-Man, 8/20/15

This dialogue could be construed as light-hearted teasing but, the facial expressions make it clear that this is some high-level spider-dickery going on right now. “I’m disappointed about how foolish you were to be jealous of the Black Widow. Your failure to trust me totally absolves me retroactively of any guilt I should feel over all the times I had sex with her!”

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Hi and Lois, 8/19/15

As a baby, Trixie is just learning how the world works. This is what she’s learned today: anything made of organic matter eventually dies and rots. There’s only one friend that will last long though to meet Trixie’s emotional needs: the sun, an incomprehensibly vast ball of atomic fire that will sear our tiny world for billions upon billions of years.

Blondie, 8/19/15

Haha, yes, remember recently when Facebook implemented this extremely brand new feature? You know, back in April of 2013? I’m not sure what’s the saddest backstory for what happened here. Did the Blondie creative team just now noticed that they could add these dumb little things to their Facebook statuses, months after everyone else got bored with them? Did this joke only now occur to them, and they felt a need to call Facebook emoticons “new” so it would still seem relevant, somehow? Is the strip written and queued up more than two years in advance, and no variation in order is permitted, not even to keep topical jokes topical? I prefer another explanation: Blondie is created by a cabal of Old Ones, who have always existed and will always exist Beyond Time. To them, two years is but an infinitesimal instant, less time than it would take them to blink, if they had eyelids, if they had eyes.

Beetle Bailey, 8/19/15

We’ve never seen General Halftrack’s office from this angle before, and now we know why: it’s depressing as shit. Just blank walls, no furniture, no art, and a bunch of scattered golf balls. No wonder he drinks.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/19/15

♬ Hey Cayla ♬ I know when that’s gonna happen ♬ It’s neveeeeerrrr