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Mary Worth, 3/14/22

I think I speak for those in long-term relationships when I say that in most, you have the ability to call in forgiveness for parallel transgressions. For instance, if, say, your husband got into a fender-bender in a parking lot somewhere and came home ranting and raving, wild-eyed and sweaty in rage, then surely when you’re perseverating about the fact that sometimes you need to maybe show a little leg to inspire a true artist, make him think about the platonic ideas of beauty and how they might relate to your face, not promising him anything, you know, not even really suggesting it, just encouraging his talent — anyway, when you’re in the middle of all that and you slam into a pickup truck at full speed, it’s not like your husband can complain, can he? Remember the parking lot incident? All the yelling you did? We’re even now, right?

Slylock Fox, 3/14/22

A question we’ve often speculated about on this blog: What exactly is the relationship between Slylock Fox and the uniformed canine police? Is Slylock the equivalent of a plainclothes detective, or is he a freelancer who happens to be working hand in glove with law enforcement? The fact that Max has to dial 911 to get the cops down here implies the latter, and the fact that he’s doing it only seconds before Slylock unleashes his big ratiocination reveal goes a long way towards explaining why the same criminals Sly repeatedly foils seem to return to their lives of crime so easily.

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Mary Worth, 3/13/22

I haven’t discussed Mary Worth all week because it has entirely consisted of Cal ham-handedly flirting at Toby and asking her out to lunch and Toby serenely pretending she doesn’t notice, or perhaps actually not noticing, while this lady looks on menacingly. Today is noteworthy mostly because Helen unleashes a deadly wave of cringe by announcing “I’ll say it again for the people in the people in the back”; I assume her point is that this is a young person phrase, and that when it’s used by old people like Helen, it’s extremely embarrassing, just like it’s embarrassing when an old person like Toby flirts with a college student like Cal. Anyway, today’s Sunday Mary Worth Epigraph™ is from former CIA head Michael Hayden, so I certainly hope somebody’s going to get waterboarded by the end of this storyline.

Dennis the Menace, 3/13/22

Mostly I’m posting this for the final panel in the middle row, in which Mr. Wilson looks appropriately jazzed to tell Dennis exactly how his favorite charismatic megafauna went extinct. With that clenched fist you can tell he’s really getting worked up about how many of Dennis’s beloved monsters died in a frenzy of flames, and then the rest starved to death over the ensuing months as dust blocked out the sun and the food chain collapsed. I’m excited for Mr. Wilson to overhear the lad wondering what happened to his other grandparents that we never see some day!

Crock, 3/13/22

Say what you will about the negative effects of climate change, but it at least it will wipe out all the characters in Crock in a huge, cleansing flood! (We realize that this is cold comfort to the 44 million or so people of Algeria and mean no disrespect to them.)

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Funky Winkerbean, 3/12/22

Oh my GOD she wasn’t talking about Lisa at all, she was talking about LES, this is a million times funnier than I could’ve possibly imagined! I had been joking that it was weird that the guy who wrote the script based on his own graphic novel/life didn’t get invited to the Oscar ceremony when his movie was up for an award, but then I remembered that Les was only the screenwriter for the original version of the movie, which was a cable TV version that Les killed when he stalked off the set in disgust, and then Mason revived the project years later with a promise that he’d do it “the right way” and also Les wouldn’t have to do any work. I don’t pretend to understand the ins and outs of the WGA credit process, which is quite byzantine, but you’d think that Les would have still gotten his name on the movie, since I can’t imagine his original screenplay was that different from the final product. But the important thing is that he’s the real winner here, not the performer who apparently made this boring glurge-fest that nobody liked marginally bearable to watch, and he will soon have the Best Actress Oscar that he earned.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/12/22

I don’t buy this: the denizens of Hootin’ Holler don’t have access to complex machinery like “clocks,” so they wouldn’t get this joke. Instead, they tell time from the position of the sun. This is also why Snuffy wouldn’t be so casual with the phrase “daylight savings time,” which he by right ought to see as a form of mind control imposed by the tyrannical United Nations.

Beetle Bailey, 3/12/22

It’s absolutely true that the average Beetle Bailey reader is of an age that they find cell phones in general and emojis in particular extremely “mysterious.”