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Mary Worth, 2/18/20

Oh no, it’s Jared! You might recall that back when Dawn was working a summer job at the hospital and falling hard for a doctor who was, unbeknownst to her, married, there was a rival for her affections: Jared, a dorky medical assistant who also transparently lusted after Dawn, offering to just come over to her apartment whenever, if she wanted him to. He was extremely clumsy and lived a sad life alone with his cat and his Star Wars action figures, but he seemed to be set up to be Dr. Ned’s “nice guy” foil, especially after he was the one who warned Dawn about Dr. Ned’s marital status. But at the end of the summer, Dawn ended up with neither of them, which, in its own small way, was a triumph for feminism, and it I find it all the sadder that Jared is apparently destined to win Dawn away not from some shitty two-timing doctor but rather from a perfectly nice age-appropriate Frenchman who has the misfortune of not being physically present.

Mark Trail, 2/18/20

Sure, becoming a social media “influencer” seems like it would be fun and easy, but if you go down that road, you will inevitably end up dead under a pile of snow, while some square-jawed, raven-haired technophobe tries to explain what “Instagram” is to a baffled Nepali police officer. Stop now before it’s too late! Turn off your phone and read a book or something!

Crankshaft, 2/18/20

I for one expected this story to be “everyone gets snowed in at the Valentie and Hannah ends up giving birth there.” And I appreciate it when the comics can surprise me with plot twists! But I don’t think any of us had any real interest in the story actually being “Crankshaft finally runs out of excuses and has to have sex with his girlfriend” instead.

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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.