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Mary Worth, 2/18/22

Look, I’m not going trying to draw any particular conclusions here, but it is really true that a surprising number of Mary Worth plots involve romances with eyebrow-raising age gaps! You know, Zak-Iris, Dawn-Harlan, Dawn-Dr. Drew, Ian-Toby … and now Toby-Cal? Toby has been whining about her birthday all week, but maybe she’s finally hit that magical age when she can stop being inappropriately young for her sexual partners, like Dawn, and instead can start finding sexual partners who are inappropriately young for her, like Iris. The c-i-i-r-r-cle of life!

Pluggers, 2/18/22

Wait. What. What? You’re telling me there are European pluggers? No. Absolutely not. Actually, hold up, that’s not a very Italian looking name, which leads me to believe that this is an American living in Rome. The only thing less plugger than a European is an American expat in Europe. I demand that this panel be stricken down by the plugger court of arbitration (which consists of three manimals lingering over all-you-can drink coffee at a diner somewhere, to the annoyance of the wait staff).

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Zits, 2/17/22

Do we, in fact, live in a fallen world of filth and degradation, where our young people are engaging in all sorts of nightmarish sex stuff that would set their chaste grandparents spinning in their graves? Well, the numbers don’t really seem to support this — US teen birth rates are at record lows, and the average age of a person’s first sexual encounter is higher for those born in the 1980s and ’90s than it was for previous cohorts. But, on the other hand, in 2009 the Zits creators could note in the intro to one of their books that they would get in trouble for using the word “sucks” in a strip and now they can just do “this kid’s dick looks like the Loch Ness Monster” jokes like it’s no big deal.

Mary Worth, 2/17/22

Oh, wow, it looks like Toby needs more help fighting her midlife crisis than we thought. “OK, let’s see how you did on this week’s assignment: drawing me as an adorable anime teen. Cal, what the hell is this? This isn’t anywhere near kawaii enough. You get an F! Get out of my sight!”

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Curtis, 2/16/22

OK, look, I don’t pretend to know everything about how other people live their lives, but I refuse to believe there’s a human who comes home from work and takes off his shoes and socks but not his tie, flops down on the bed, and calls a life insurance company. I refuse, do you hear me? I can only assume — especially in light of panel three — that some sicko tweeted often enough at the Curtis creative team and King Features demanding that Greg Wilkins show feet that they finally said, “Enh, what the hell.”

Funky Winkerbean, 2/16/22

Sorry for my objections from yesterday, everybody! In fact, the Lisa’s Story Oscar trajectory makes total sense. It’s simple: the movie was released to the art-house circuit in early 2020, and then theaters were shut down in the first wave of the pandemic, and in [checks notes] October 2021 Les got the first report that the movie had flopped, but then it found a second life on streaming so now it’s going to be nominated for an Oscar in [squints at calendar] February of 2022. This all adds up! There’s a persistent rumor that the Funkyverse strips are written a full year in advance and I haven’t always believed it but honestly that would go a long way towards explaining this sequence, especially considering that last year the nominees were announced in March whereas this year they were announced, uh, last week.

Mary Worth, 2/16/22

Toby knows just how to chase away those encroaching middle aged blues and recapture that feeling of being a little girl again: marrying a much older man who likes to give her condescending little pep talks while grabbing her by the chin.

Family Circus, 2/16/22

God damn it, Family Circus, I got halfway through this caption and was all excited to make a joke about how Whitney is lucky because she doesn’t get sent to the principal’s office for yelling that dinosaur bones were put in the ground by the devil to trick liberals, but now I have to live for the rest of my life with the awful knowledge that Dolly spends every day at school squirming and holding it in because the toilets at school are never as clean as mommy makes the ones at home, and I’m not excited about that at all!