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Mary Worth is also invited to the wedding, so it’s gonna get real Oedipal up in there

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Curtis, 11/30/22

Curtis may have been a little late in celebrating Charles Schulz’s 100th birthday, but it’s making up for lost time with a whole week of beloved Peanuts character Franklin tutoring the strip’s education-resistent title character. They’re going to the always reliable joke of “this art style’s specific stylizations would look baffling and grotesque in the context of another art style with a different set of stylizations, were characters from the two universes to coexist.” Curtis may be focused on Franklin’s huge mouth, but I’m more weirded out by his mohawk. I guess if you 3D-modeled Franklin based on the original drawings, you’d come to the conclusion that he had a mohawk, but I don’t think he had a mohawk.

Mary Worth, 11/30/22

Oh, that mysterious figure from Zak’s past? You’d better believe it’s his beloved baby sitter, the one who made him the delicious rice-gravy slurry that to this day serves as an erotic Proustian madeleine! I think it’s very funny that in the last few days in this strip characters have spent a lot of time blissfully thinking about how Zak and Iris’s age gap isn’t problematic at all, and now suddenly we’re barreling full-speed towards “WHICH SUBSTITUE MOMMY WILL WIN?????” territory.

Beetle Bailey 11/30/22

I was pretty mad at Beetle’s response in the first panel when I read it, to be honest. Why does it have to have something to do with you, Beetle? Why can’t your girlfriend just tell you something interesting about her workplace and her day, huh? But then in the second panel it quickly becomes clear that their relationship is in fact wholly transactional, which frankly is a real downer.

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Zero, dark and gritty

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Beetle Bailey, 11/29/22

Beetle Bailey has recently established that, in addition to being extremely stupid, Zero is also an extremely accurate rifleman. But how can the U.S. military harden this peaceful simpleton’s heart so that he can use his skills to kill America’s adversaries? Well, it turns out that Sgt. Snorkel is actually pretty good at the “teach your soldiers to dehumanize the enemy” part of the job.

Crankshaft, 11/29/22

One of my least favorite Crankshaft tropes is when the gang treats Lena, a coworker who is always depicted as nothing but delightful as a person, with wholly undeserved contempt, especially when it comes to her cooking and/or making coffee. Like, fine, she’s probably bad at it or whatever, but their reactions are always way over the top in a way that I guess is supposed to be “exaggerated for comic effect” but always comes across as mean-spirited and unpleasant. Today’s strip, in which Ed declares that Lena’s cookies actively interfere with the Christ child’s mission to redeem mankind from sin, is a good example.

Dick Tracy, 11/29/22

Say, remember back in 2017, a more innocent time, when we all learned that Dick Tracy knows what cosplay is? Well, this is the year when we learn that Dick Tracy knows what furries are. Maybe he’s going to shoot one, or shoot somebody who’s robbing one, who knows!

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A panoply of unpleasantness

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/28/22

Oh my God, this Rex Morgan, M.D., plot really is going to be “Mud Mountain Murphy only pretended to have a catastrophic digestive situation so he could move up from opening act to headliner,” huh? Well, since Rex vaguely tried to offer Mud medical assistance, I look forward to him shutting down his clinic altogether after this. After all, how can he be sure that any patient who walks through the door isn’t just faking it to help their career in the entertainment business? And then Rex would have used a portion of his precious and limited reserves of human empathy for nothing. Better safe than sorry!

Dustin, 11/28/22

I guess when it comes down to it, none of us should be surprised that Dustin’s dad works at a law firm that specifically caters to real assholes who hate their kids, right?

Pluggers, 11/28/22

Look, everyone, it’s a drawing of a down-home, salt-of-the-earth dog-man guzzling laxative so he can shit himself thin! I dunno, man. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this one.