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Mary Worth, 1/9/22

Oh, hey, so, uh, Wilbur died, everybody! Wilbur … died? I mean, maybe he didn’t die, I have a hard time believing they’re killing off Wilbur, but, uh, probably in real life, this would result in his death, right? You might recall that back in 2012 Wilbur already stared death in the face from the deck of a cruise ship, and later declared, correctly, that he shouldn’t be alive, so it’s possible that for the entire last decade every last one of us has been living through his Final Destination scenario, which would explain [gestures around vaguely] a LOT. Anyway, I guess his gradual shift from “Charterstone’s lovable loser” to “the least pleasant person you’ve ever met or even heard of” over the past few years was meant to prepare us for this moment, and while it may be premature to write him off just yet, I’m still starting a GoFundMe to pay Sir Elton John to do an updated version of “Candle In The Wind” for our boy.

Marvin, 1/9/22

In other death and dying news, Jenny has left her awful son out alone in the yard to freeze to death and is planning to flee to the tropics and start a new life, a plan her husband is being remarkably dense about.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/9/22

I guess nobody is going to die in Rex Mogan, M.D., but if Rene successfully sues the Morgans into oblivion for actual intellectual property theft, Rex might have to start living like a common poor person and that’d be worse than death, right?

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Blondie, 1/7/22

If you’re a longtime reader of this blog, you know that Elmo is one of my Blondie obsessions. Who is he? Where are his parents? Why does he spend so much time with Dagwood, an adult to whom he is unrelated? Well, a faithful reader recently sent me a report from her visit to the Library of Congress, where American tax dollars are (correctly) being used to maintain old Blondie strips that shed some light on the issue. Both Alexander and Cookie started out as babies in the strip before gradually aging up to teenagerhood and then staying there; as you can see in this strip from 1954, Elmo was originally introduced as a playmate/potential crush object for Cookie when they were about the same age.

Blondie, 7/21/54

Since Dagwood was originally concerned that Elmo would eventually steal Cookie away from his home, it’s particularly ironic that today Cookie and Alexander are usually off doing teenager things, leaving only eternally tween Elmo around to serve as Dagwood’s substitute child. However, as we can see in today’s strip, there are some family qualities that can never be replicated. Elmo is just brushing all those crumbs, which account for at least a dozen calories, onto the floor! A true Bumstead would just be hoovering them up into his insatiable maw. In the final panel of today’s strip, Dagwood grieves because no matter how much affection he has for Elmo, there will always be a gap between them.

(Meanwhile, the next to last panel of that 1954 strip reveals that, no matter what you think of the Bumstead living room arrangement that has Blondie perpetually sitting with her back to her husband, it’s at least an improvement over the previous scenario, in which she had to sit on the floor.)

Mary Worth, 1/7/22

One of my pet peeves is that so many media pundits are basically in the business of making short- or long-term predictions about what’s going to happen — in politics, the stock market, sports, whatever — but suffer almost no consequences when they are consistently and routinely wrong. Thus, in order to show my commitment to accountability, I want to acknowledge that while I predicted a couple days ago that Wilbur would do the Titanic “I’m the king of the world!” routine crying and alone, in fact he’ll be doing it alone and giggling and drunk, for about thirty to ninety seconds before he falls to his unmourned death.

Family Circus, 1/7/22

It’s Grandma’s facial expression here that really makes this panel for me. She just looks so happy! “Hell yeah,” she thinks, “this goop is gonna slide down my gullet in complete silence — just the way I like it.”

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Mary Worth, 1/5/22

I think we were all ready to read the end-of-year Mary Worth lull as representing an at least temporary shift away from Wilbur’s romantic antics, and thought that maybe we’d catch up with Ian and Toby or Dr. Jeff or, heck, maybe even some new one-off characters Mary can meddle with, which is the sort of plot that used to be the bread and butter of this strip! Thus our abrupt return to Wilbur/Estelle On The High Seas in this first week of January has taken me by surprise, and I also wouldn’t have guessed that it we would get so quickly into daily recap territory, but look, you can’t have Wilbur angrily declaring that he’s going to storm off in the wake of his wildly ill-advised marriage proposal and sleep … on the buffet? in the boiler room? in steerage with all the colorful Irish peasants from Titanic? … and expect me not to talk about it.

Gil Thorp, 1/5/22/

Oh, snap, is gambling-mad Pranit betting on games that he’s playing in? No, he’s just using gambling lingo metaphorically, but sadly Milford High has spent years slashing its humanities budget to fund its STEM program and bloated athletic department, so nobody he’s talking to understands what “metaphors” are.