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Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody! Which of today’s valentine-themed comics is the most depressing?

Blondie, 2/14/19

Is it Blondie, where the title character is an eternally youthful bombshell yet still needs to go to increasingly grotesque lengths to elicit the sexual interest of her food-obsessed husband?

Beetle Bailey, 2/14/19

Is it Beetle Bailey, where the title character has fallen asleep and his girlfriend is using him like a sex doll, but for feelings? (I somehow find the glass on the end table here particularly evocative; I assume Beetle, committed to never ingesting any stimulant that might impede his ability to doze off, took a few sips of room temperature tap water before slipping into blessed unconsciousness mid-date.)

Mark Trail, 2/14/19

Is it Mark Trail, where Cherry wistfully remembers the time where there were romance comic strips, the sort of comic strips where a character might get her emotional and physical needs met once in a while, you know?

Six Chix, 2/14/19

Is it Six Chix, where this lady is on a date with a sock puppet? You know, the extremely normal and relatable situation where you meet someone and they turn out to be a human arm inside a sock that has eyes sewed on it?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/14/19

In fact, to find true emotional fulfillment in today’s strips, we need to go beyond the world of traditional romantic attachment. For instance, imagine that you’re a ham radio operator who lives out in a desolate wasteland. Not a lot of opportunities to go on dates out there, of course. But now imagine a plane full of people suddenly arrives, their cell phones useless. They need to be able to communicate with the outside world somehow … using some kind of radio apparatus … perhaps one operated on an amateur basis. This is it. The moment has arrived. Other people dream about the day they stand at the altar, before their family and friends, to be united forever with their beloved. You’ve been dreaming about this.

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Mark Trail, 2/13/19

Well, it’s finally happening: newspaper revenues are plummeting so much that they’re resorting to desperate measures. Starting this month, every comic strip in the paper is going to have to dedicate at least three strips a month to having the main characters grinning and saying how much they love comic strips, and implying that talking to other people about comic strips is a great way to pique their interest in you, sexually.

Mary Worth, 2/13/19

Boy, Toby’s been worried about the state of her marriage, but it turns out that all that happened was that Ian became so sexually obsessed with a student who had only shown passing interest in him that he couldn’t figure out what kind of grade to give her even though she had failed to do any of her classwork! I bet Toby feels pretty silly, now.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/13/19

“Ha ha, get it? It’s funny because he doesn’t remember words any more, because of the brain damage! It’s OK to laugh — he’s not following any of this! His brain is pudding, and someday soon mine will be too!”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/12/19

I’m really enjoying Rex’s grim facial expression as he slides safely to earth here. Brayden may have a weirdly adult affect, but at least he’s letting out a rowdy “whoa!!!” Rex, meanwhile, is thinking back to his time in grade school, when he was surrounded by other children who didn’t treat slide-time with the extreme seriousness it deserved. Now he’s going to show them how it’s done, by God.

Gil Thorp, 2/12/19

Oh, whoops, it seems that it’s just the prospect of therapy that has supercharged Mike Filion’s basketball skills. But now that he’s doing great on the court, maybe he doesn’t need therapy at all! You know what they say: winners don’t use drugs, but winning is a more powerful drug than anything the scientists at GlaxoSmithKline could come up with!

Family Circus, 2/12/19

Not sure who this ginger is or how he managed to wander into the Keane Kompound, but Ma Keane is clearly taking no chances of any unauthorized interactions transpiring between him and her brood. Is he here to steal valuable Keane darndest-thing-saying intellectual property???