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Gil Thorp, 6/2/22

So Gregg wore his dumb mask, the opposing team figured out he was blind and peppered him with bunts, and now he’s real depressed and giving up even the pretense that he’s a teenager. “Look at my hair!” he shouts. “I’m an old man! The only reason I’d go to the park is to yell at the young women about how they should dress more decently in public!”

Mary Worth, 6/2/22

Speaking of dressing indecently, oh my goodness, after a dull few days when Dawn and Jared endlessly rehashed his intense insecurity about the fact that she looked at another boy at the zoo and coming to what seemed like a boring consensus about how it was nothing and nobody should fret about it, Dawn is now going to Da Club behind Jared’s back, because their relationship is in fact extremely unhealthy! The last time we saw Dawn out at what I assume is Santa Royale’s hottest and noisiest goth club, she was there with her art history professor and surprised her dad’s ex while wearing this truly incredible outfit. Tonight’s ensemble, with just a hint of bondage around the décolletage, is somewhat more subtle, but I still appreciate the occasional forays into Dawn Fashion to help me keep up with what the kids are into these days. Anyway, does her friend … have a nose? A whole nose? It looks like she might not, right? And her name is Cathy? Hmmmmmmm?

Funky Winkerbean, 6/2/22

The joke here is that the boy waited till after graduation to ask out the girl so there’s no time for them to really form a relationship before they go away to college, but I think this strip would be funnier if she actually just decided she didn’t like him and instead of politely riding out the next few hours is telling him repeatedly that there will be no date #2.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/2/22

Oh, man, I certainly hope they don’t call Rex until the Sunday strip, because we’re gonna need a lot of panels for his ponderous, exasperated sigh.

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Six Chix, 6/1/22

Look, I’ll admit that I’ve spent quite a bit of time on this website — too much time, really — inflicting my musings about mermaid biology onto you, the innocent reader. Shamefully, a lot of it has focused on their reproductive lifecycle, thanks to Hagar the Horrible always shoving that in our face, but today I want to talk about locomotion. Usually when you see depictions of mermaids, they’re sitting on rocks jutting out of the sea or the beach or something, and without much thought you can accept that they kind of hopped up out of the water like a seal. But even if this bar is right on the wharf, this mermaid would have had a long way to go to get there, presumably dragging herself over the boardwalk and then across the floor of the bar before somehow managing to haul herself up on that stool. Have mermaids evolved extremely strong arms in order traverse land when necessary to escape predators or drop environmental knowledge on ignorant humans? Or does their powerful fluke propel them across the ground in a sort of flopping motion?

Funky Winkerbean, 6/1/22

Remember when Funky Winkerbean did a big time jump forward, like ten years ago, and loudly proclaimed that it would be focusing on a new generation of teenagers, and that its former teens, now a bunch of swiftly decaying middle-aged losers, would fade into the background, but then that never happened, because Funky Winkerbean in the ’70s may have been about fun teens but Funky Winkerbean in the 21st century can only ever be about how you, the reader, personally, are dying? Well, now the teens are taking on crippling debt, just to so that their own universe will pay more attention to them because they too are suffering. It’s sad, really!

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Dick Tracy, 5/31/22

I apologize for my commentary yesterday in which I claimed that Dick Tracy would not want to get to the bottom of this whole non-violent bank robbery situation. In fact, there’s nothing Dick would like more than to put these smarty-pants computer-using cyber types in jail, and if they’ve been doing crimes with their IBM PCs, well, that’s just a bonus. I respect the understated way that the Cinnamon Knight, whose whole deal is that he dresses up like a knight from the late middle ages, explains that cyber crime is “not his speciality,” because you can’t stab it with a sword, I guess.

Pluggers, 5/31/22

Man, the combination of “Jingle Bells” being in a thought balloon, the slouch, and the plugger’s heavy-eyed expression sure adds up to a lowkey grim panel. “Jingle Bells,” thinks the plugger tunelessly, thinking about how these days Christmas is about the only thing he can get excited about, with the lights and church service and family all around, while the rest of the year just feels more and more difficult to take, and we’re about halfway between Christmases and it’s hard to imagine holding on for another year but I guess this utility bill isn’t going to mail itself, “jingle bells.”