Post Content

Mary Worth, 3/12/19

Oh, hey, if you’re wondering where the Estelle/Arthur Z (or, more accurately, Estelle/team of catfishers hanging out in a Kuala Lumpur cybercafe operating the “Arthur Z” SilverDaters account) is at, it’s reached “quoting e e cummings over the phone,” and Estelle is over the moon! The main question I have is if they’ve somehow tricked her into calling into a phone number she has to pay them for, or if they’re doing this toll-free via Skype or whatever and they’re keeping their powder dry for the moment when “Arthur Z” loses his wallet and needs a five-figure sum wired to a Malaysian Western Union office, stat.

Mark Trail, 3/12/19

Meanwhile, in Mark Trail, Cherry’s dad just got a phone call letting him know his old friend died, which means we have six to fifteen weeks of a “Doc confronts his own mortality!” adventure ahead of us. Not sure how they’re going to work Mark blowing up a boat into this but I’m confident they’ll find a way.

Beetle Bailey, 3/12/19

The Wikipedia list of Beetle Bailey supporting characters is invaluable to a scholar of the Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC oeuvre such as myself, but I have problems with some of its takes on the players’ personalities. For instance, Dr. Bonkus (NO REALLY HIS NAME IS “DR. BONKUS”) is described as “Camp Swampy’s loopy staff psychiatrist, whose own sanity is questionable,” but in all the time I’ve been reading the strip he’s never been anything other than a long-suffering straight man to everyone else’s antics. I kind of enjoy the fact that today’s strip takes place in two entirely different locations; it would have been a little shticky if Rocky had pulled out his guitar and delivered this punchline in mid-session, but as it is we can imagine that he just said “Great!” and got off the couch and left without further explanation, leaving Dr. Bonkus behind to sigh heavily and contemplate, not for the first time, just how much he really helps his patients.

The Phantom, 3/12/19

You’d think that when you’ve been raised from birth to be the 21st in a lineal series of mysterious jungle superheroes, you wouldn’t make rookie secret identity mistakes along the lines of “me … uh, I mean, not me, my close personal friend, the hero, who isn’t me at all, heheheheheh [nervous laughter gradually fades out]”

Six Chix, 3/12/19

Congrats to Six Chix for taking its weird foot thing to the next level … indeed, to the highest possible level. Who wouldn’t want to worship a God with such magnificent toes? Truly we are blessed to be formed in His image, foot-wise.

Pluggers, 3/12/19

Ha ha, did you guys know that bears are carnivores and kangaroos are herbivores? I sure hope plugger diner seats are pleather or some other material that’s easy to hose the blood and viscera off of!

Post Content

Family Circus, 3/11/19

Look, I long ago gave up on trying to figure out how exactly the process operates behind the scenes of long-running legacy comic strips, so I’m not sure why we got two Family Circus panels in the last three years with different art but essentially the same joke. Is this just a case of someone unconsciously coming up with the same joke twice and then redrawing a Dolly-praying-before-bed panel, or, perhaps more likely, pulling out a different entry from the presumably fairly sizable collection of Dolly-praying-before-bed panels? Or are the two panels meant to be companion pieces? Back in 2016, Dolly said the pledge because she couldn’t think of any “new” prayers. Today, she couldn’t even remember the Lord’s Prayer, perhaps the most important in the Christian canon, because all the space in her mind dedicated to devotional rituals is now occupied by nationalistic display. Truly, the Keane Kompound is under seige!

Dick Tracy, 3/11/19

The joke here is that Joe Sampson, the detective who came to town last week with lurid tales of gym teach murder, is Dick’s daughter Bonnie’s ex. But if you didn’t know that, you might think that Dick is just furious that Bonnie isn’t hanging on his every word. “Bonnie? How dare you be distracted, a man is talking.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/11/19

Hootin’ Holler is grindingly poor, with an economy revolving around subsistence farming, moonshining, and chicken theft, and it’s an open question as to how the various outsiders who come into town to serve professional roles eke out a living. Parson Tuttle makes it work with relentless and unapologetic grifting, but Doc Pritchart has it easier: his practice is just a front for nonstop Medicaid fraud.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/11/19

“That would mean someone might want to spend enough time with me to have a sexual relationship some day, and, really: have you gotten a handle on my personality over the past few hours? I don’t think that’s in the cards.”

Slylock Fox, 3/11/19

“Ha ha, it’s a baby! A baby was born on board! Pretty wild, huh? Now everyone calm down and let’s figure out which one of us has to drown. Should it be the baby?”

Post Content

Crankshaft, 3/10/19

I’m ashamed to admit to Not Remembering A Thing about comics, but … wasn’t there a period of years in this strip where Lena was always off-panel, the unseen butt of everyone’s grousing over her terrible coffee/brownies/etc.? This helped develop the idea of her as a true, legendary monster, but at some point, this pointless running gag stopped running and Lena was revealed to be a perfectly nice person to whom all the other characters are mean for no good reason. Like, today! Where everyone is clearly going to go bowling and they’re making up a transparent excuse to have her not go with her, because they don’t like her! I know the core gag of Crankshaft is “All these people are assholes” but it’s pretty rare that it’s done so explicitly.

Dennis the Menace, 3/10/19

At first I looked at this strip and saw this car rambling down a winding dirt road in the isolated countryside with Dennis, not in a child seat or even a seat belt, lounging in the back seat, and I assumed this was part of Henry’s plan to get rid of his menacing son once and for all in a terrible “accident.” But then I noticed Henry isn’t belted in either! That means we’re looking at the last tender moment before a murder-suicide, which is pretty dark even for this strip.