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Mark Trail, 2/5/20

Sorry I haven’t been keeping you up to date with recent developments in Mark Trail, but they go something like this: Dr. Camel thought he heard the tell-tale whistle of a yeti and so he just bolted out of his tent into the Himalayan night, and also into what appears to be an avalanche in progress, and now Genie, his lover (?), is running after him. If Mark Trail ends up standing dispassionately over their frozen corpses tomorrow morning, snaps a picture of them for the cover of Woods and Wildlife, says to nobody in particular “I guess the yeti will just have to remain a mystery,” and then starts heading back down the mountain, I admit I will be kind of impressed.

Blondie, 2/5/20

I have now reached an age when I see incomprehensible tech jokes in legacy comics and have the nagging feeling of “are they out of touch or am I?” Like, on the surface this all makes no sense to me, but … maybe deleting pics off each others phones is how the prepubescent set flirts these days? Like it’s the equivalent of a mischievous boy dipping a little girl’s pigtails into an inkwell, except it’s up-to-date, and gender-neutral, and also causes you to lose your cherished memories? At any rate, Elmo has learned a tough lesson about regularly syncing your devices with the cloud, and Dagwood has learned that maybe he should take pictures of things sometimes, with one of these new-fangled “cameras” everyone’s talking about.

Mary Worth, 2/5/20

Wilbur is, of course, referring to that time he decided to travel the world for his dumb column and Iris dumped him, which led to her very successful and happy relationship with hot young millionaire Zak, and also led to Wilbur getting sex-grifted in Colombia. It’s still not entirely clear to me whether Dawn ever learned about the latter episode, and now I dearly hope she didn’t so that when Wilbur describes the whole thing to Hugo in graphic and erotic detail, she’ll be hearing about it for the first time.

Family Circus, 2/5/20

Is … is Big Daddy Keane actually smiling at his son’s ignorance? “That’s right,” he’s thinking, “this is America. No son of mine will be pressing anything but 1 for English.”

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Gasoline Alley, 2/4/20

Gasoline Alley is in the middle of a story where Baleen the waitress has some sort of will-they-or-won’t-they thing going on with the short order cook, whose name is, uh … OK, look, I know I read the comics so you don’t have to or whatever, but I refuse to keep track of what the ancillary characters in Gasoline Alley are named, OK? I just … I only have so much brain space and I’ve apparently decided to dedicate a lot of it to an encyclopedic history of Mary Worth storylines so you can look it up yourself, I dunno. The point is that I guess the guys in panels one and two are supposed to be inspiring jealousy in our short order cook man, and maybe they’re supposed to be handsome? Possibly? The gentleman in panel two has a certain Carter-era Donald Sutherland charm, I have to admit, but the first guy is just kind of grimace-winking and it is not erotic or appealing, in my humble opinion.

Hi and Lois, 2/4/20

Hi and Lois is of course about 60% still stuck in the Mad Men era, aesthetically, which is kind of interesting for assessing the whole look of our receptionist here whose mild flirtation has sent Hi into such a sad, sad tizzy. Like, she could be a hip young thing circa 1961, or she could be doing a rockabilly revival look from the ’90s, or she could be from right now, when I think this aesthetic is making kind of a comeback! Lois’s subtle contempt is, of course, timeless.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/4/20

Ahhh! Andrzej is a wrestler! Or, as Aunt Tildy, an aficionado of the squared circle would put it, a rassler! This love connection is gonna happen, I just know it!

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Mary Worth, 2/3/20

Folks, remember when Mary Worth storylines would be about randos who drifted into Mary’s orbit for a few months? Remember Delilah and Charley, and the guy who kept trying to convince his wife to eat more, and Nola the office sexpot, and Entertainer Esme? But for the last couple years, the strip has almost exclusively revolved around Wilbur and — I’m not afraid to say it! — people who are sex adjacent to Wilbur, i.e., Estelle (currently having sex with Wilbur), Iris (previously had sex with Wilbur), Dawn (would not exist if someone hadn’t once had sex with Wilbur), Tommy (the knowledge that at one point his mother was having sex with Wilbur on the regular almost certainly was one of the underlying causes of his drug habit), etc. Why can’t this strip stop rubbing it in our face that Wilbur fucks? It’s so bad that when we took a detour last year in a plotline that asked us to consider Ian Cameron a potential object of sexual desire, it came as a relief. Anyway, I assumed that Hugo would quietly fade out of the strip, just like he would quietly fade out of Dawn’s life, but it looks we’re going to get a plot where Wilbur has decided see what all the fuss is about re: the hot French guy his daughter’s fucking. Hopefully this time around he’ll have the courage to ask him “Are you a professional? Or into illegal activities?” to his face.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/3/20

Meanwhile, Rex Morgan, M.D., is doubling down on old people. Remember Aunt Tildy, and how she was convinced she ws dying? Welp, Rex ran some tests and it turned out she just had a fairly basic set of mild and easily treated age-related problems. Meanwhile, here’s Andrzej who’s healthy as a horse, maybe because the years he spent as partisan in the Polish forest as a teen fighting Nazis toughened him up, or maybe he just eats right and exercises, who can say, but the point is that Aunt Tildy could use more of his can-do attitude. Could Rex and June play matchmaker between these two? That might help Tildy find a real emotional grounding that will improve her outlook about her health, or at least get her out of the Morgans’ house.