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It’s the most blessed time of the month: First Friday! The Internet Read Aloud is back on stage at its new time, TONIGHT, Friday May 6, at 7 pm in Los Angeles! This month starring Katie McVay, Gena B Jones, and Kylie Brakeman!

We’re at The Clubhouse in Los Angeles and the show is free! Be vaxxed, masked, and emotionally available! Here is the Facebook event!

But that’s for the evening. Today, during the day ….. we comment of the week.

“Ian never realized that Helen carried a torch for him for so many years … Anyway, she talked to him and that did the trick … Now she never wants to hear from him again! Problem solved!” –Thelonious_Nick

And we runners up as well!

“Wait, who’s the plugger here? Is Henrietta Beak not a plugger now? Do we have to remember who Mr. Beak is? Do we have to deduce things about a character who is not shown? Because let me tell you, Pluggers readers don’t roll like that. Pluggers barely have object permanence!” –matt w

“Good news: the Brisk Iced Tea sponsorship deal came through! Now we just need to namedrop their brand as many times as we can, but we also need to be subtle about it.” –Westing1992

“Helen’s face in the next-to-last panel is, and I’m saying this without any kind of irony, the best drawing ever put down in Mary Worth, and I encourage everyone to zoom in on it. She looks like the protagonist of a magical girl anime right after being reminded there’s a test today, just this frozen moment of cartoonish terror right before comical jets of tears start shooting from her eyes as she screams about life’s unfairness, which yes, is a perfectly reasonable reaction to have when you have to go snuggle Ian in the next panel.” –Dan

“So the Lowell Observatory hires people who are shaky on how (or even if) telescopes work. Good to know.” –Joe Blevins

“I don’t care for this remake of Don’t Look Up. Or possibly Melancholia.” –made of wince

“The quotes are gone around Onion’s name, which in the Curtis world means his parents had it legally changed.” –Trofe

“Looks like Beetle has discovered induced demand: see, it doesn’t matter how big you make that screen, more unwashed humanity is simply going to roll in and block your view. Ugh, people.” –pugfuggly

“It’s good to know that not a penny of the massively bloated US defense budget is being wasted on chairs for enlisted soldiers to relax at the end of the day.” –Tabby Lavalamp

“Toby & Cal & Helen & Ian is the remake of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice that nobody wants, so of course it is what we are getting. We’re all being punished for wanting Wilbur dead.” –Malaclypse

“Holy crap, today’s Mary Worth drops a massive hint about the worldbuilding at play. Ian taught in Franklin, the State of Franklin, which in our timeline was an unrecognized area of eastern Tennessee that petitioned and failed to become the 14th state of the Union! But in Mary World, Franklin obviously was recognized as a state! Maybe Ian taught at the University of Franklin in the capital city of Greeneville (go fighting Crocketts! (named after Gov. David ‘Davy’ Crockett, who founded the school)). Maybe Franklin became a Unionist bone in the Confederate craw during the Civil War, leading to a quick Union victory and substantial and prolonged Reconstruction which (bear with me here) eliminated the NeoConfederate resurgence, which means the African-American Great Migration to the North and West wasn’t as sustained, which explains, finally, why there are only white people in Mary Worth! The mind boggles.” –Voshkod

“Shoe is a Nietzschean universe in which God is dead but its inhabitants are full of joy and merriment. Truly if you gaze into the googly eyes of horrors, the googly eyes of horror gaze also into you!” –Ettorre

“Hi and Lois guide to comic strip creation: 1. Take a perfectly ordinary conversation. 2. Illustrate it as if there’s a joke. 3. Tee time!” –Rube

“Hi Flagston has good reason to look so concerned about Chip going to the movies. The Batman photo in the paper reveals that he lives in the suburbs of Gotham. About 25 years ago, a very wealthy couple were violently gunned down in full view of their only child after leaving a movie theater. If the protected classes can’t go to the movies safely, then none of us can.” –Dave in Pittsburgh

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Dustin, 5/6/22

Dustin is a truly amazing strip, one whose whole purpose is to poke fun of the foibles of young people despite clearly having no real sense of how young people live their lives, and one of the ways this manifests, as I have frequently griped, is that the young people characters go to fern bars in order to seek out romantic entanglements, like it’s the god-damned Reagan Administration or something. I guess some garbled communication has filtered back to Dustin HQ that modern hookup culture is entirely focused on dating apps now, which could explain why this young lady is at a fern bar but also on her laptop for some reason.

Hi and Lois, 5/6/22

I was going to make fun of Hi for seeming so shocked that Chip and his date might go dutch, but then I realized he has that same slack-jawed befuddled look in panel one as the conversation begins, too. Honestly, he looks like that a lot of the time! That Hi Flagston, just a befuddled dipshit stumbling his way through life on the funny pages!

Pluggers, 5/6/22

Ha ha, I absolutely love the look on that dog-man’s face. It’s gonna be real horror show in that house and this guy knows it.

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Pluggers, 5/5/22

I think I’m discovering the shape that my Gen X pluggerdom is going to take: in constant complaints that Pluggers, the syndicated newspaper comic strip, is depicting the plugger lifestyle incorrectly! Anyway, for a plugger “logging on” is sitting on a log with a grandchild or a good buddy while fishing, are you trying to tell me that pluggers are lacking in human contact but have two-factor authentication turned on for most of their online accounts, are you for real

Mary Worth, 5/5/22

Every ongoing work of art creates narrative suspense in its own unique way. Mary Worth, for instance, is keeping us guessing this week. Yes, in any normal storytelling situation, if there had been some big drama built up and suddenly we smash-cut to one of the participants telling a third party “Oh, yes, the conflict was resolved, my husband took care of it off-panel,” we’d obviously expect that the problem has not, in fact, been solved at all! Because that doesn’t really make sense, and it doesn’t make for a very satisfying story. There’s gotta be something more to it! But this is Mary Worth, so there is in fact only a fifty-fifty chance that there’s something more to it.

Lockhorns, 5/5/22

An ordinary person would just do the Jaws music at this point, but no ordinary person would remain in the twisted, hate-filled Lockhorn marriage as long as Leroy Lockhorn. Somehow the thought of Leroy delivering this line in a soul-numbed monotone is both infinitely funnier and infinitely sadder than just having him go “Daaaaahhhh DUNH” or whatever.

Shoe, 5/5/22

While the bird-Jews of Shoe still follow the teachings of the Torah and the Talmud, it appears the bird-Christians have turned their back on the Nicene Creed and now worship the Father, the Son, and the late Jeff MacNelly.