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Mary Worth, 4/29/21

There’s a lot of suspension of disbelief that goes into enjoying a comic strip like Mary Worth, and sometimes I can pull it off and sometimes I can’t. For instance, I absolutely refuse to believe that Drew has managed to become mildly Instagram famous without ever letting slip in one of his captions that he’s a doctor, and yet immediately upon being presented with his meal blurted out “It looks better than the hospital cafeteria food that I’m very familiar with because of all the time I spend in a hospital — and not as a patient! [wink wink]” That sandwich looks like shit, by the way, and also the side of slaw Ashlee so grandly announced is nowhere to be seen, so I’m assuming Northview’s cafeteria is of particularly low quality.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/29/21

If you know me, you know that few things exercise my deranged mind like trying to figure out the socioeconomic/political situation of Hootin’ Holler, so today I’m less interested in Uriah unicycling the mail all over the region than I am in the fact that Silas, who is not a government official but the proprietor of the town’s only store, is paying for his transportation. My current theory: the Post Office was violently ejected from the town decades ago, possibly in reaction to its attempt to impose the “number of the beast” in the form of zip codes. Silas, who needs to maintain a connection to the outside world in order to keep his store of manufactured goods stocked, is the only person still receiving mail, and he’s set Uriah up as his private delivery man, charging townsfolk outrageous markup over regular postage rates. For legal reasons, he refers to his delivery service as the “Newnited States Post Office.”

The Phantom, 4/29/21

I make fun of soap strips all the time when they’re inadvertently funny, so I feel obligated to point out when they’re successfully funny on purpose, like when Heloise begins a Heloise-centric storyline by describing her dad as “off somewhere punching a guy,” an incident I hope we never hear any more details on.

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 4/28/21

Ha ha, it’s funny because Grimm wants to murder a cat! No, wait … it’s funny because … Grimm is doing mafia cosplay, and has announced his desire to murder a cat using gangster patois? There’s no wordplay or anything, it’s just funny when a dog pretends to be a gangster, to lend a thin veneer over the murders he already wants to do?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/28/21

Remember a couple years ago when we learned that war hero amputee Jordan actually did a little light stolen valor? Anyway, I’m excited to learn soon that Michelle wasn’t working with COVID patients at all, just doing regular checkups, but really any patient these days could have COVID, if you think about it, oh, and also she was doing all her sessions on Zoom.

Gasoline Alley, 4/28/21

Incredibly, these two met just eight weeks ago and are already married! That’d be a quick courtship in any context, but is especially crazy in Gasoline Alley, given that the strip once spent eight weeks explaining how cool scrapbooking is.

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Mary Worth, 4/27/21

Oh man, I honestly don’t know where this is going exactly but I’m very excited about it. I think every soap strip should do a storyline about social media influencers, because I want to find out what all of them think social media influencers are! Anyway, this strip is chock full of things I love, including but not limited to (a) Ashlee responding to Drew asking her if she takes photos by specifying that she takes selfies and then (b) immediately showing him a picture that is obviously not a selfie (side note, I’ve been obsessed with a Buzzfeed article I read last month about the theory that many influencers’ “mirror selfies” are actually just pictures of them taken by someone else while they hold up their phone, but Ashlee isn’t even doing that level of pretense), and (c) Drew says “You certainly have the looks to be one!” only after seeing the picture of her, even though he’s been looking at her IRL all this time. Anyway, I certainly hope that Ashlee initiates a torrid sexual relationship with Dr. Drew in hopes that he’ll post some of her selfies to his high-profile account and in so doing boost her Instagram following, which is probably the saddest reason to sleep with someone that I can possibly imagine.

Judge Parker, 4/27/21

Judge Parker isn’t doing a social media plot, but a storyline where Sam Driver gets punched in the face is almost as good.

Gil Thorp, 4/27/21

After blowing up a perfectly nice dinner, Abel Brito has been presented with a choice: either he drops the subject of libraries, or he works to join the library board and implement his vision of transforming money-losing libraries via a public-private partnership into profitable Amazon Reading Centers™ that are free to enter for all Prime subscribers.

Pluggers, 4/27/21

With all the shit I give Pluggers on this blog, you might be surprised to learn that some days it moves me and spurs me to make a difference in my life. For instance, today’s panel moved me to finally text our plumber to come deal with the toilet handle, after I tried and failed to fix it several weeks ago. Congratulations, Pluggers, on providing this call to action. I thank you, and more importantly, my wife thanks you.