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Gil Thorp, 5/28/21

They say a happy marriage is one where each partner can still surprise the other, and by that definition my longtime partnership with soap opera comic strips has still got it. When this saga began at the library board meeting, little could I guess that it would lead here here, with a librarian gently letting a teen boy that she’s been acutely aware of his erotic assignations in the stacks, and looking over her glasses as she asks pointedly if he lacks for company tonight.

Hi and Lois, 5/28/21

Every once in a while, Hi and Lois likes to remind you that Beetle Bailey is Lois’s brother. Look, Chip has a picture of his Uncle Beetle on his nightstand! Also, it looks like Beetle has left the army and works for a fast food franchise now? Or maybe he’s joined a Communist army?

The Lockhorns, 5/28/21

I guess the joke here is that Leroy has made so little impression that his boss doesn’t even know his first name, but it’s pretty clear based on the banner that none of the underlings know their boss’s name either! Just a real sad lack of workplace camaraderie all around.

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Mary Worth, 5/27/21

We all frankly know that the intertwined personal and (aspirationally, on both parts) professional relationship between Drew and Ashlee is going to hilariously unravel into unhinged acrimony at some point. The delicious narrative tension arises from the question of how, exactly, this will go down. Personally, based on panel one here, in which Ashlee’s limbs are splayed in random directions and her mouth twisted into a rictus grin, my bet is that Drew is going to post a bunch of these pictures to his Instagram and they will be terrible, just laughably bad, thoroughly humiliating Ashlee online and producing a ragestorm that will make her public meltdown from a few weeks ago seem like a calm and rational conversation about a misunderstood scheduling conflict.

Anyway, this panel has delighted me like few others in recent memory, and while I’m not sure I have the energy to run a formal contest, per se, along the lines of the ones I did for self-clubbing Tyler in Gil Thorp and Rex and June’s funeral facial contortions, I certainly wouldn’t object if anyone were to attempt to reproduce Ashlee’s pose/outfit/whole vibe here, photograph themselves in the process, and email the results to me at bio@jfruh.com, and I would definitely post any photos I received on this very blog!

Beetle Bailey, 5/27/21

Hey, guess what year the sale of leaded gasoline for personal vehicle use was fully phased out in the United States? 1996! Guess what the average age of a private in the U.S. Army is? Less than 20! If you think those two numbers seem at odds, maybe contemplate what the average age of a Beetle Bailey reader is instead.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 5/27/21

I am a squeamish indoor kid who does not like bugs, so I am experiencing zero regrets about the fact that I no longer live in Baltimore, which is currently ankle deep in screaming cicadas, according to all my friends there. Anyway, each of those cicadas now befouling lawns across the Mid-Atlantic was laid as an egg 17 years ago, it’s fun to think of them as “teens” to whom you would not loan your car, just like regular teens! That’s because every single neuron in their tiny brains is focused on fucking and then dying, just like regular teens.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/26/21

So Sarah’s been writing this very long fan letter to Kitty Cop scribe and noted local writer’s block sufferer Kyle Vidpa for a while now, and Rex has done nothing but make fun of her for it. I had naturally assumed this was primarily because Rex likes making people in general and his children in particular feel bad for experiencing enthusiasm, but let’s not forget that Rex may be projecting a bit because he also sincerely dislikes being on the receiving end of enthusiasm, even from people who owe their lives to his doctoring skills. As far as Rex is concerned, the only way to demonstrate your positive feelings for someone is to send them a tiny envelope that is exactly large enough to include a check and nothing else. Please do not write “thanks!” on the memo line.

Mary Worth, 5/26/21

A key thing to remember about this storyline is that that Ashlee chose Drew as her photographer because of his Instagram account, which in turn earned a decent following not because he actually takes portraits of people, but because he takes nature pics. But gosh darn if the good Dr. Corey the Younger isn’t going to throw his all into this assignment, by dressing Ashlee in an extremely cringeworthy fringed two-piece and yelling things at her that he’s probably half-remembering from the sequences in Austin Powers where Austin is going undercover as a fashion photographer.

Pardon My Planet, 5/26/21

“Aw man, I guess if this joke is going to be contemporary, it should reference Netflix, not normal television. Netflix has season lineups, right?”