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The Phantom, 5/14/20

The current Phantom poaching storyline has been boring enough that I haven’t covered it on this blog, at all, but if you think I’m going to not comment about a grinning guy sawing a lion heart in half in the daily newspaper, you’ve got another thing coming! Anyway, basically the plot was that an evil American poacher wounded a lion but didn’t pursue it to kill it, because he was a coward in addition to being evil, and so after the Ghost Who Saws Lion Hearts In Half handed over the poacher to Llongo Justice, he tracked down the wounded lion to put it out of its misery. And, well, you know, hunting lions is bad, but if things have come together in such a way that you have to a hunt a lion, for the lion’s sake, then you might as well cut the lion’s heart in half and feed part to your semi-tame wolf, right? Go ahead and saw it in half! It’s A-OK, in this fairly contrived scenario!

Mary Worth, 5/14/20

Nothing much to say about today’s Mary Worth except holy cow check out Jared’s absolute piece of shit car! I love that even though he’s the “winner” in his battle for Dawn’s affections, the strip wants to be very clear that his life is still sad and pathetic. Is that … duct tape? Are those two relatively small pieces of duct tape all that’s keeping the hood from flying open, which will presumably result in Jared veering wildly off the road and killing them both? Let’s hope!

Pluggers, 5/14/20

So you better not tell them to do it or they’ll stop doing it just to spite you and prove you’re not the boss of them, they don’t care how good an idea it is or how many people they kill

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Beetle Bailey, 5/13/20

Literally every single one of Beetle Bailey’s running bits has been repeatedly done to death over the strip’s decades in print, with all possible variations mined for even trace amounts of humor, so I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that today’s edition of “Let’s crap on Lt. Fuzz” focuses on the fact that he gets more information via sound than smell. What a nerd, amiright?

Funky Winkerbean, 5/13/20

Look, Les, I do have a certain amount sympathy with … well, not with you, per se, but with anyone who finds themselves in the position of needing to perform some version of their genuine grief for professional reasons. But I guess you should’ve seen that coming when you decided to build your entire creative career and indeed your entire personality on the foundation of “I lost my young wife to cancer.” Now dance for the nice lady, Les! Dance! Weep real emotionally genuine tears if you want that sweet, sweet Hollywood cash!

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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.