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Baby Blues, 2/17/20

Huh, like more than a year ago I made a drunken boast about including Baby Blues in my comics-reading rotation, and I have, but it turns out I … almost never talk about it? Anyway, I’ve sort of hesitated to say that I find the single-breadwinner, stay-at-home-mom structure of the family kind of antiquated — not that such families don’t exist, of course, especially when you have three quite young children! I’ve always kind of wondered about the family’s career/economics situation, and according to the strip’s Wikipedia page Wanda used to work in PR while Darryl is some kind of generic “manager.” It’s definitely intriguing that Darryl thinks Wanda striking it rich on YouTube would be a big benefit for him personally, presumably because he could quit his job and “follow his bliss” while Wanda has to yell at her kids in ever escalating ways for her millions of devoted followers (she’s starting a YouTube channel because a vid of her yelling at her kids went viral, by the way). Probably CPS won’t show up for at least a month!

Dennis The Menace, 2/17/20

“Get it, like a grumpy grandpa? Seriously, though, he’s just my neighbor, and I hang out at his house all the time. We’re not related at all. It’s weird, right? I’m not gonna say it’s not weird.”

Beetle Bailey, 2/17/20

Ha ha, it’s funny because the violence Sarge dishes out on Beetle is the product of intergenerational trauma!

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 2/16/20

Wow, this is, uh, a little low-rent for Slylock and Max, isn’t it? Usually they’re off making arrests and solving mysteries to uphold the dignity of, and the monopoly on legitimate violence claimed by, the Glorious Animal Regime and its monarchy. But today they’re serving as chauffeurs for a bounty hunter, a sordid figure straddling the boundaries between public and private justice, and learning the finer points of how to sneak up on someone so you can drag them screaming from an abandoned house as part of some no-doubt extremely grim and depressing feud. Anyway, it looks like despite everyone’s best precautions, Slick Smitty has managed to escape, leaving behing poor Reeky Rat to take the fall, as usual.

Mary Worth, 2/16/20

Dawn is, of course, a perpetual romantic victim — two-timed by Dr. Jeff’s son, left near-comatose after being dumped by some guy named Dave, wooed by married men — and so I think we all assumed that when her long-distance relationship dissolved in acrimony and deceit, exactly as Wilbur predicted, it would be because Hugo was stepping out. But now it appears that Dawn is the one feeling “restless” and “alone.” Who knows what erotic temptations will await her at Tony’s? As much as I’m tired of Weston-related drama, I have to admit that I’m kind of interested to see Dawn dish out heartbreak instead of suffering from it.

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Crankshaft, 2/15/20

We’ve already seen the 10-years-ahead version of Max in Funky Winkerbean, still running the barely solvent Valentine, so I guess, despite the heavy air of foreboding looming over the final panel of this strip, that he isn’t going to die in a ditch on this dangerous night ride. I can’t remember if we saw Hannah and/or their future child during that sequence, though. Maybe she’s going to die in childbirth? Right there, in the theater? Because Crankshaft doesn’t care about his own safety or the safety of others? It would sure make the failure of the Valentine, his last connection to his dead beloved, all the more poignant!

Curtis, 2/15/20

The “humor” in today’s strip, which involves Greg making a joke, then Curtis getting that joke, then Greg making another joke, is barely worth discussing here, but I do want to say that the overarching plot of the past few weeks has been that Greg threw his back out and is in a lot of pain, and never has the art sold this concept more aggressively than today. The man looks properly miserable in a very visceral way, and I respect it.