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Family Circus, 5/17/19

God, I honestly love Big Daddy Keane’s whole deal here. He looks beaten down by life, his facial expression numb and his tie just a little loose and disheveled, and mostly what he wants to do is take that spoon he’s holding delicately in his big, meaty mitt and just go to town on that enormous bowl of chocolate pudding. Look at all that pudding! That’s like a soup bowl’s worth of pudding! And it’s his due, as the family breadwinner. Jeffy sticking his grubby face into his peripheral vision is just pissing him off. Let the man eat his pudding in peace, Jeffy.

Six Chix, 5/17/19

I also enjoy today’s Six Chix, because based on the dialogue you’d expect the speaker to be sort of heavy-lidded and languorous, just dully shoving cookie after cookie into her mouth and barely tasting them, but in fact she’s staring at a half-eaten cookie wide-eyed with anxiety, as if she can’t fully articulate what mania is causing her to keep eating them. Her boyfriend is asleep, or maybe dead.

Mark Trail, 5/17/19

“Boy, am I glad we found Skull Mountain!” is the sort of thing a guy says, ironically, right before he gets killed by a bunch of spooky, evil skeletons.

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Curtis, 5/16/19

Thanks to the operation of comic book time, as the years go by I relate more and more to Greg Wilkins as a peer, and for people Greg and my age, “the turn of the century” will always mean the late 1800s or early 1900s. But guess what! Curtis, who’s in his middle school years, was, as of today, born sometime in the later part of the first decade of the 21st century, so for him “the turn of the century” probably means, like, the 1990s. And he’s still not interested in it! Because it was before he was born, and is dead history to him! There are millions of real kids out there with this wholly normal attitude, just in case you personally wanted to dwell on that and feel the icy cold of death settling in your bones.

Gasoline Alley, 5/16/19

But if you want to feel young, on the other hand, just check in with Gasoline Alley, which isn’t afraid to repeatedly interject 1950s character actor Frank Nelson into its trademark “the characters tell jokes that are incomprehensible both to the audience and to the other characters” antics.

Hi and Lois, 5/16/19

Oh snap

Motherfuckin ouch for moths

Moths are cancelled, everybody

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Mary Worth, 5/15/19

Oh hell yes this Mary Worth plot is going to get jazzed up by the introduction of a beloved character from the past, namely (I’m assuming) Terry Bryson! We first met Terry back in 2008, when she was brought onto the scene to explain to Toby exactly how badly she fucked up when she got her identity stolen online. Then, much more interestingly, in 2015, she got tracked down by her ex Adam, who was both her ex-crime-fighting partner and ex-lover. At first she was hesitant about renewing their relationship, but eventually they bonded over their shared love of jiu-jitsuing the shit out of ne’er-do-wells and then making out in front of them. Anyway, the point is that Mary is going to call this trained assassin out of retirement and she is going to track down Arther in his filthy hovel and eliminate him, because she is that serious about stopping cyberfraud. The doves in the first panel are an indication that the remainder of this storyline will be told in the style of famed Hong Kong director John Woo, which is to say extremely violently.

Gil Thorp, 5/15/19

Way back in 2005, earnest young feminists Hadley Baxendale and Steve Luhm fought to level the playing field between the He- and She-Mudlark teams, and it appears that the long moral arc of the universe has finally gotten itself fully bent, because I’m pretty sure the single panel of incomprehensible sports action that begins today’s Gil Thorp is the first we’ve heard of the boy’s baseball team this year, and we just as quickly turn back to the girls and their on-field winning ways and their “too cool for school” madness quickly spiraling out of control. Can you imagine how dull whatever the boys are getting up to must be for this business to be spring’s only plot?

Blondie, 5/15/19

You ever want to do a joke about how a tech thing makes some traditional scenario different for the kids today, but don’t follow through because you don’t actually know how people use the tech thing you want to joke about and don’t care to find out? Well, the popular and successful comic strip Blondie thinks you’re being a little too precious about it, my friend.