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Mary Worth, 9/15/19

Reading this strip, I suddenly had an intrusive memory of one of the all-time great Dawn Romance Fail plots. In the aftermath of her near death at sea, Dawn was on the lookout for a more meaningful life, and Mary had just the thing: doing volunteer work down at the hospital! Dawn immediately met Jim, a nice young man with one arm who lost his arm and his sister (who looked exactly like Dawn) in the same tragic boat accident, which meant that Jim had to prevent Dawn from getting near any bodies of water at all costs! He also wanted Dawn to have sex with him, and got angry and abusive when she turned him down, but Dawn’s extremely competent psychology professor taught her that it’s very important for women to break down the emotional barriers between themselves and the men who want to fuck/yell at them, so she managed to convince Jim to ease up and just be friends. And, having truly achieved her goal of living a more meaningful life, she never had to hang out with Jim again, but it sure took a while to get there! That’s why it’s great that this noble burn victim has managed to pass in and out of Dawn’s life in only a few moments, giving her a tissue … and a reason to live, and love again … without hanging around or making her pretend to like him or anything like that. He’s got his own rich, fulfilling life going on somewhere else! Probably! I mean, we’ll never know, but let’s just assume.

Hagar the Horrible, 9/15/19

I’m often fascinated by the way the top row of throwaway panels in a Sunday strip, which aren’t printed in many papers, can change the whole tenor of the piece. Like, if you didn’t have them today, this would just be the story of Lucky Eddie being late to dinner with Hagar for some unknown reason. But with them, it’s the story of Lucky being late for some unknown reason and made even later by a couple of comical farmer types who blocked the whole road! Really makes you think, doesn’t it?

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Mark Trail, 9/14/19

“Shh, Cherry, shhh, everything will be OK … I promise you,” Mark said, gently but firmly removing the Cherry-unit’s head so her system would deactivate and he could safely store her. “No need to worry her,” he thought. “I’ll just reassemble her when I get back from Nepal and she’ll never even realize I was gone.”

Dustin, 9/14/19

Hot tip for dude cartoonists: if you ever have the urge to do a strip about how “ha ha, women sure sometimes just SLATHER ON THE MAKEUP, amiright”, just be sure your lady characters are the ones doing the talking! Then it’ll all be on the up and up. We all know how catty women are, right? Mrr-ow!

The Phantom, 9/14/19

Hey, if you’ve been reading The Phantom for a while and you ever wondered “Hmm, would someone raised from birth to be a gun-toting warrior who goes on to suffer incredible physical and psychological trauma on mission after mission end up with, like, PTSD, maybe,” today’s dream sequence has some answers for you!

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Try not to be too spooked by the calendar to enjoy today’s comment … of the week.

“I’d be downright annoyed if my naturalist husband thought I still believed in cryptozoology after listening to his lectures for 12,943 days straight, but Cherry looks downright worried. Maybe that’s because Mark is an emotionless void and she lives in terror of his unpredictably flat affect, not knowing whether the next words out of his mouth will be ‘I know, honey, I’m just trying to lighten the mood‘ or ‘divorce.’ But I prefer to think this is less about her and Mark and more about her and yetis. ‘I’m not worried whether yetis are real or not,’ she says, her hands unconsciously tracing the curves of her blouse, much as white-furred, larger yet gentle hands had done, during one of Mark’s two-week expeditions that somehow lasted around seven months. ‘Ha ha ha, abominable snowmen, the stuff of cartoon movies! Who would BELIEVE such things? NOT ME, CERTAINLY!’” –T Campbell

The runners up? Also very funny this week!

“I think the flashback is supposed to be the night she got pregnant: ‘Italian food would be a bit too exciting for my aching stomach, but sex with you should be all right.’” –Handsome Harry Backstayge, Idol of a Million Other Women

“Beautiful thoughts, Trixie. Meanwhile, next door, Thirsty is drunk again.” –Little Blue Bicycle

“This strip is as on fleek as that mom’s bandanna. That’s something the kids say, right? Means stiffly-starched?” –pastordan

“‘Where they stay until they expire?’ If I know even one thing about pluggers (i.e., too much), it’s that their love for playing by the rules is far behind their love for bargains and giving minimum wage-earning cashiers grief.” –Irrischano

“[Coroner in a month]: ‘Cause of death: Sui-Tide™.’ [smirks] ‘Get it?’” –Foodar

“Here’s hoping that other cartoonists will join Batuik in raising awareness of CTE, by having one character in each of their strips bludgeoned to death. Maybe let the readers vote?” –Zla’od

“Wotsamatta U is meant to sound like Whatsa Matter You, which is kind of a dialect, maybe Italian. It means, What’s The Matter With You? Get it? Get it? No, I don’t mean I think you’ve got anything wrong with you. It’s just a joke. Geez. What are you, Italian or something? Don’t be so thin skinned.” –Only Here For The Ads

“I like that this joke is delicately balanced on three premises: (1) babies compete with each other in organized contests (2) babies can choose the foods that they will have access to and (3) babies have made the important link between diet and gastrointestinal performance, and use this information to strategize! It’s the kind of thing you could only come up with by the standard Marvin joke method: start with the punchline ‘POOP’ and work backwards.” –pugfuggly

“Do plugger cats come running to the sound of the can opener? Do they sometimes, shamefully, turn on the can opener just to feel something?” –Voshkod

“Sorry, can you rage a little harder as you insist you don’t have a drug problem? That will make it even more convincing!” –BigTed

“So, Henry’s got a photo album full of muscle fetish porn. Meanwhile, Alice is snickering in the background because Henry doesn’t know about her weekly nooners at the gym. Suddenly, Dennis is the least menacing member of this household.” –jvwalt

“It’s ironic, because it struck the North Face of the fort.” –Pozzo

“Dawn is being approached by a stranger with disfiguring scars? Looks like she’s about to learn an important lesson about, um … something.” –Noel

“This cannonball brought to you courtesy of Grumman Allied Industries, Inc. ‘When you think big balls, think Grumman.’ Have a great day, enemy combatant.” –Maude R. Fawker

“Mermaids don’t have shells the way snails do. When they are little, they live in them like hermit crabs to avoid predators. This lasts until they are grown enough to overcome their shyness and go lure sailors to their deaths, at which point they can start living in the wrecked hulls of ships instead. Lucky Eddy would know all this if he were able to read.” –pachoo

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