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I know it’s paradoxical, but you will never initiate sex by using the word “initiate”

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Mary Worth, 3/4/22

Here’s a weird thing that happens sometimes in Our Dumb Dystopia: people will make storefronts on Amazon even though they don’t have anything to sell. Instead, they set bots up to find other stores that actually have things to sell, create listings for the same items the other stores sell, mark up the price by a dollar or two, and then use SEO trickery to try to make their store a higher ranking search result than the real one. When someone tries to buy an item from their store, they just order from the real store, who does all the work, and they pocket the difference, having done nothing. This can sometimes produce truly bizarre results, like when the bots that do this for two fake stores lock onto each other, each assuming the other is real, and each keeps raising its price to be just a little higher than the other, until someone notices that soap or toothbrushes are selling for more than a million dollars. I’m bringing this up because today’s Mary Worth shows what would happen in a similar situation, except instead of two Amazon storefronts, we have two robots who have been programmed to attempt to convince a real life human to have sex with them. “But not for initiating a ‘fling’ with you!” and “go sit in the corner, Cal!” give off very strong “we showed this AI 10,000 hours of people flirting and this is what it came up with” vibes, except it was more like 20 hours, tops.

Sam and Silo, 3/4/22

The internal worlds of newspaper comic strips are extremely resistant to change, which makes them great little time capsules of social mores that were quite different not that long ago and have changed in ways most of us don’t think much about. Just as Blondie still takes place in a world where suburbanites let their dogs roam freely at night, Sam and Silo in whatever year this rerun is from failed to move up into the world where most people’s housecats would be fixed as a matter of course. Because this cat? This cat fucks, everybody. He fucks a lot.

Gasoline Alley, 3/4/22

GASOLINE ALLEY ADMITS IT: LITERALLY ANYTHING ON TV OR IN THE MOVIES IS MORE EXCITING AND FUN THAN GASOLINE ALLEY

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Mostly smug dads edition

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Marvin, 3/3/22

Man, Jeff’s facial expressions here are a real journey — and not, to be clear, a journey I enjoyed. In panel one he’s very excited, and if you didn’t know what this strip’s whole deal was, you might think he likes to cook and is happy to help out with tonight’s dinner. But, nope, it turns out he’s just thrilled to let his wife know that her cooking sucks in a new, hilarious way! His facial expression in the final panel is positively post-orgasmic. Obviously these two don’t have sex anymore because the last time they did they created Marvin, so I guess this is the only way Jeff can get off.

Crankshaft, 3/3/22

I touched on this last week, but, like — a year ago? two years ago? who can even say — there was an excruciating two weeks of Crankshaft strips where this one-armed guy with a beard, who apparently was the last employee at the local newspaper, went to New York and gave a long, indignant speech about corporate media control to the manager of the hedge fund who owned the newspaper and then quit. It was so boring that I never talked about it on this blog, and I’m reasonably sure we had never even met this character before, but I guess we’re finally getting the payoff to it because as I predicted the mysterious meeting was about launching a community newspaper, which is all well and good. But said meeting was organized (and the project funded?) by the historical society lady, and our ace reporter is about to learn that his new paymaster can be as controlling as any hedge fund. Is the Fire Department running a prostitution ring right of the firehouses? That can wait, because this lady’s rival for the PTA presidency is about to be destroyed by the free press.

Dustin, 3/3/22

“Ha, it’s funny, because we’re on the verge of financial ruin due to your mother’s neglect! Anyway, I’m just gonna keep eating this tiny cookie like a dipshit.”

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Mopey Pete aims to shatter the mope barrier into megamope status

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Funky Winkerbean, 3/2/22

I truly enjoy the fact that these two old timer comics artist have been dragged out of retirement (one of them was actually dragged back to life from the realm of ghosts and spirits) to add a little Golden Age verve to Atomik Comix, only to be told they should do a comic where their super-powered heroes should battle, like, a metaphor, man. Their facial expressions in the final panel are absolutely appropriate.

Beetle Bailey, 3/2/22

TIRED: Sarge and Beetle’s public antagonism is a cover for a secret sexual relationship that has a lot less reason to be secret now that gay service members can serve openly.
WIRED: Pvt. Blips and Spc. Gizmo are a couple of real freaks whose kinks cannot be accommodated by banal physical reality. They spend all day plugged into their Oculus Rifts and teledildonic rigs so they can enjoy the experience of 69ing each other in the metaverse as two unicorns with multiple sets of genitalia or whatever. These kids are the nastiest people in this comic and I am here for it.

Blondie, 3/2/22

I was about to say that a doctor saying, “C’mon, can’t you open wider than that?” to a child would be fine but saying it to an adult would be extremely creepy. But isn’t Dagwood essentially a child, with his constant cheerful indulgence of his own appetites, his love of dressing up, and his inability to take his job seriously? He definitely should be condescended to like an 8-year-old and his doctor knows it. Anyway, he also has throat cancer.