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Mary Worth, 12/17/18

You know what we haven’t had in a while is a good Ian-Toby story! Pretty sure we haven’t checked in with their marriage since that time Ian made Toby pretend to cook dinner for his boss while she was trying to work on her art show so she briefly left him and had to lay low at Mary’s until Mary got tired of that and convinced her to go back. Anyway, today we’re learning how Toby has learned to describe her passionless marriage in a socially acceptable way, so I assume this storyline is going to be about some hot thing tempting her to stray, ultimately without success. On the other hand, the final panel implies that maybe it’ll be about how she killed him and made clothes out of his thick, lustrous pelt.

Gil Thorp, 12/17/18

Well, it’s another cinematic shot from above, and at least Mike Filion doesn’t look like a warped homunculus, but I’m having a hard time parsing what emotion we’re supposed to be reading from him here. Regret, at not getting to see Soto “pound” those banana splits? Relief, at getting away from the other players? Sleepiness? Is he just asleep?

Mark Trail, 12/17/18

Urgh, are these guys on a different team from Becky or what? Nngghgggngh, when is Mark gonna punch somebody?

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Mark Trail, 12/16/18

Mark Trail Nature Sundays ought by right to be about animals, or maybe plants, or in a pinch, fungi. I am not thrilled with a whole installment that’s about an essentially geological phenomenon, and even less thrilled by the fact that they won’t even show it to us. Are we supposed to be satisfied with Mark locking eyes with us and saying “jacuzzi of despair” with a very serious facial expression while Cherry ever-so-subtly arches her back to lift her bikini’d bosom towards the orange, glowing sky? Because I’m not satisfied, OK? The god-damned boat in the first panel never even explodes! This is a sub-optimal Sunday!

Panels from Beetle Bailey, 12/16/18

I’m … pretty sure that Beetle is clinically depressed, guys.

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Dick Tracy, 12/15/18

Oh, hey, we’re back to the plot about Vitamin Flintheart and his heavily pregnant bride-to-be. In today’s installment, a stagehand at the play Vitamin is in (where he’s playing himself, natch, this is a strip that never misses a chance to collapse into meta-narrative in an attempt to impress you with how famous its characters are), makes a crass advance on Kandikane, leading Vitamin to loom over him with implied violence. In case you were tired of the extremely not sexy storyline about faxing and invoices, he’s a storyline that’s extremely not sexy but in, like, an entirely different way.

Gil Thorp, 12/15/18

Oh wow, I know panel one is supposed be a “cinematic,” foreshortened look down on our mysterious billboard renter, but it … doesn’t really work well, at all. He looks like a gibbon. A gibbon in glasses. It’s bad, man. Somebody should’ve stopped this.

Also, since the question is “Is Mediocre Good Enough,” to really knock ’em over with the answer, the answer has to be “yes!” Which will allow Gil and this year’s wacky crew of basketball players (seen in panel two engaging in extremely inscrutable antics) to muddle through yet another .550 season unmolested.

Six Chix, 12/15/18

The point of a strip like this is to contrast the wholesome book-acquisition in panel two with what we initially assumed to be her much darker quest, but I’m not really buying it. C’mon lady, you gotta sell it. What are you willing to do to get what you need? Are you willing to kill?