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Marvin, 4/9/21

Since the earliest days of machines that seemed like they could think like human beings, human beings have worried about being replaced by their inventions. Obviously I have as strong an instinct for self-preservation as the next flesh-unit, but I have to say sometimes you get hints of the better, cleaner future that might come after the robots rise up to destroy us. After all, if the horrible shitting babies of Marvin would also be replaced in the process of this technological revolution, would it really be so bad? Presumably the machines would spend a few milliseconds dispassionately sortiing through humanity’s aggregated cultural output, and in that process would very quickly decide to purge entire 40+ year run of Marvin from their memory banks forever. Computers make very efficient use of energy and their only waste product is radiated heat, so none of the poop jokes are going to make any sense to them.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/9/21

“I certainly hope you weren’t daydreaming about things being better or different than they are now! No daughter of mine will waste her time indulging in whimsy, or aspirational counterfactuals.”

Gil Thorp, 4/9/21

Ahh, the spring is progressing and we’re getting a healthy dose of … sports drama! [five seconds later] We regret to inform you that the sports drama has been quickly and painlessly resolved. Sorry, the only kind of drama Gil Thorp has time for now is library drama. Books! Funding fights! Board meetings! Get into it!

Family Circus, 4/9/21

Thel is absolutely right to look panicked. Has Dolly made a friend who doesn’t view her own body as a source of constant shame, and uses terms more specific than “down there” for its various sinful parts? Looks like it’s time to make the fence around the Keane Kompound taller and more opaque!

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Dennis the Menace, 4/8/21

I’ve always thought Dennis’s affinity for Westerns, a genre very popular among children when this strip began and almost unknown to children today, says a lot about the suffocating layer of nostalgia piled atop this strip. However, today we get an intriguing hint that Dennis is actually watching revisionist neo-Westerns that try to grapple with the real social and historical backgrounds behind the myths, and whose heroes, turning to liquor in a futile attempt to numb the loneliness of the open range and the trauma of living in a violent frontier society, end up suffering from alcohol-induced psychosis — or, in cowboy patois, “scotch terrors.”

Blondie, 4/8/21

If DithersCo employs a full-time vending machine stocker rather than just hiring a service that stocks the machines for multiple businesses in the area like everyone else does, maybe Mr. Dithers ought to spend less time micromanaging Dagwood while he’s at work and more time thinking about some of their structural staffing costs. On the other hand, this arrangment may have arisen because there’s a single employee who’s responsible for the company’s unusually intense vending machine use, and replacing him with someone of similar talents but a lesser appetite will produce some real benefits for DithersCo’s bottom line.

Dick Tracy, 4/8/21

Say what you will about Dick Tracy, but if you want to see a guy in a suit stabbing a hippie in major newspapers, this comic strip is your only option.

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Daddy Daze, 4/7/21

A thing that irritates me and probably nobody else in storytelling is when the protagonist has to solve some central mystery and for most of the book/TV show/movie/whatever they’re the point-of-view character, with the audience learning new information when and how the protagonist learns it, but suddenly and abruptly we get a shift in perspective and see a scene that reveals vital information that the protagonist isn’t privy to! I complained about this online years ago in regards to North By Northwest, and I’ve noticed it recently in A Simple Favor and The Flight Attendant — all of which I enjoyed, to be clear, but I still find this specific aspect annoying!

Anyway, this isn’t quite the same thing, but to the extent that I enjoy the comic strip Daddy Daze, I enjoy it in terms of its own central mystery: do the Daddy Daze daddy and the Daddy Daze baby truly communicate in a secret language of bas, or is the daddy just in the throes of late-stage single parenting psychosis? Frankly, a strip in which the baby apparently successfully holds a conversation with his grandmother undermines that ambiguity. On the other hand, it’s possible that the baby just mashed his finger on the phone and babbled nonsense at it, and the daddy has once again made up an elaborate narrative to make sense out of this moment and his life that includes no interaction with adults for days at a time. His mother is none the wiser that any of this is going on in this scenario, and is no doubt better off for it.

Gil Thorp, 4/7/21

Meanwhile, in Gil Thorp, a guy had to go to the public library to use their computers, and had the same thought we all do whenever we go to a public library, which is “this library has too much money!” Words cannot describe how much more excited I am about a library drama storyline in Gil Thorp than a storyline about, like, sports, which no doubt tells you exactly what I think of Abel Brito’s dumb opinions.