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Mary Worth, 4/12/21

Finally, finally, we are blessedly moving on from Saul and Eve’s emotional process and starting a new storyline in Mary Worth, and hell yeah it involves Dr. Drew Corey, the son Mary’s semi-boyfriend Dr. Jeff Corey! You may best remember Dr. Drew from that time Dawn decided to romance him, and he was receptive but also happened to be dating another lady at the same time, which earned him a thorough slapping that haunted him literally for years. He seemed like he had learned some valuable lessons from that episode and we haven’t heard much from him since, so it’s exciting to learn that he’s still kind of a dick. “Every day brings an interesting mix of ills! Get it, dad? Because they all have some terrible disease, poor bastards. Good thing Dr. Drew is here to help them! Or not, whatever, I get paid either way, it turns out.”

Dick Tracy, 4/12/21

Speaking of new storylines, we’re finally done with Dick Tracy’s hippie nonsense and have moved onto a new storyline here as well, which seems to involve a prisoner who, based on her pallor and catchy nickname, is clearly deceased. I guess it’s no surprise that in the carceral Neo-Chicago police state, not even death can keep you out of the clutches of the punitive justice system.

Crankshaft, 4/12/21

Wow, after some vaguely pandemic-presaging strips a few weeks ago, it looks like Crankshaft is going to leapfrog over the last year-plus of our lives entirely and just skip to “gosh, remember the pandemic, that was crazy,” huh? I’m of two minds about this: it could’ve really brightened my 2020 if I had been constantly wondering who in Crankshaft’s friend group of terrible old people was going to die of COVID, though I ultimately would’ve been bitterly disappointed when the answer turned out to be “none of them.”

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Dustin, 4/11/21

Not sure what makes me madder here: that Dustin produces this massive hanger-tangle out of nowhere; that this comic’s writer has apparently never heard the words “anger” or “hanger” spoken aloud, and just assumes based on their spelling that they rhyme and can thus be deployed for today’s punchline; or that the strip opens with Dustin’s mom with her back to her interlocutor, a dramatic noir shadow over her angry face, but she just wants to talk to Dustin about clothes organization or whatever and not the murder of their mutual enemy, his hated father.

Blondie, 4/11/21

I kind of enjoy the fact that this strip sets up two delightfully bonkers scenarios — “Dagwood and Mr. Dithers go on a hellish business trip together” and “a big fat raccoon goes absolutely nuts in the Bumstead home” — without actually showing us any of the details of either. It allows our imagination to run wild with both, instead merely showing us the brief calm between these two storms.

Dennis the Menace, 4/11/21

Wait, what if this is true? What if Mr. Wilson really is happy most of the time and only gets grouchy when Dennis shows up, which just happens to be the only time we ever seen him? Guess we’d all owe him a big apology, huh? Ha ha, just kidding, we know Mr. Wilson rages about Dennis even when he’s absent, he’s not a happy man at all. And now that Dennis is just straight-up calling him by his first name, he’s gonna be even less happy! Enjoy suffocating on your own bile, you sour old coot!

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 4/10/21

I’m old enough to get the why of it, but it’s genuinely funny to me that “flatscreen” is used as a shorthand for a certain kind of luxury electronics, often with the connotation that it’s an indulgence you shouldn’t be spending money on. It’s literally not possible to buy a new non-flatscreen anymore (I’m sure there people who prefer such vintage TVs for their “warmer analog picture” or whatever), and you can now get flatscreens for cheaper, indexed for inflation, than CRTs ever were! Anyway, there’s a lot going on here, including (a) a therapist who looks like a 1970s (?) stereotype of a Freudian analyst, (b) Grimm is stealing things from Mother Goose, who he lives with?, (c) someone (Mother Goose?) is paying to send Grimm to therapy, and (d) they have pills for kleptomania now????, but for whatever reason it’s the flatscreen thing that jumps out at me.

Dustin, 4/10/21

Sorry, as an [extremely heavy sigh] daily Dustin reader, I reject the central premise of today’s strip. Dustin’s mom absolutely does not care if Dustin’s dad lives or dies. Nobody does!