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Mary Worth, 5/12/20

A fun thing about even a pretty narratively explicit medium like the comics is that you can always fill in some of the lacunae with your mind to create the version of the story you most want to read. For instance, there’s nothing in the second panel of today’s Mary Worth making it explicit that there’s a long, lingering silence after Dawn says “I worked things out with Hugo” — a sentence that any normal human would interpret to mean that Dawn and Hugo had patched things up and would continue to operate as a couple, leaving Jared either as a side piece or, more likely, a piece of rejected romantic detritus on the side of the road — but there’s nothing that strictly speaking precludes you from imagining that silence, either. So I’m imagining it. I’m imagining Dawn running into Jared’s arms off the jetway, nestling her chin on his shoulder, and saying, enraptured, “I worked things out with Hugo!” and letting that sit there for a minute, only moving on to “We agreed to be friends!” after his big, ugly, heaving sobs have started and can’t be stopped.

Gasoline Alley, 5/12/20

In case you’re wondering, the actual line in question is “Folks these days just don’t do nothin’ simply for the love of it.” So yeah, this guy will dip into the lyrical repetoire of popular music in order to make his rhetorical point, but he’ll be damned if he submits to these punks’ grammatical barbarism.

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Gasoline Alley, 5/11/20

A problem with any kind of narrative is distinguishing between the things individual characters know and ways they interact with each other on the one hand, and ways the creator of the narrative intends to interact with their audience on the other. What I’m trying to say is that it would be very likely in-universe that this shambolic event would eventually devolve into a speaker telling the audience specifically to Google some 36-year-old Don Henley lyrics, rather than, say, actually listening to the song on Spotify or something, but it’s just as likely that Gasoline Alley sincerely intends this to be a helpful suggestion for the comic’s audience itself. Anyway, check out this long-haired young fella’s thoughts on the farming crisis, he’s got some good ideas!

Funky Winkerbean, 5/11/20

Wow, Les, act like you’ve been here before, will ya? Because you have. During your last ill-fated trip to LA to try to turn Lisa’s Story into something people might actually enjoy, the studio actually put you up at the Chateau Marmont, so you’d think you would gotten all that actress-leering out of your system! Anyway, I certainly hope that ‘Pink Entertainment’ is the newly founded studio arm of the Susan B. Komen Foundation, set up solely to create entertainment products that raise awareness of breast cancer, because that will make it all the sweeter when they reject Les’s little graphic novel as unfilmable schlock.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/10/20

Hey, everyone! Were you worried that Buck was going to be inconvenienced, even briefly, by Truck’s illness? Well, good news: he won’t be! Also, it’s very sporting of you to pretend that you actually were worried about Buck. I know for a fact that nobody is worried about Buck. Anyway, a good way to enjoy your Sunday is to imagine that Buck is saying “Autographs. Always with the autographs” the same way Martin Sheen says “Saigon. Shit, I’m still only in Saigon” in the opening scene of Apocalypse Now.

Funky Winkerbean, 5/10/20

There are a lot of Mother’s Day comics out there today that depict moms getting appreciated by their kids and partners, but that frankly isn’t the thing that satisfies my twisted reasons for reading the funny pages, so here, here’s a strip where Les calls his wife and just monologues for five panels about how everything sucks.

Dennis the Menace, 5/10/20

Ha ha, it’s funny because Dennis was going to kill his best friend, but now he’s just going to kill his dog!