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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/9/18

Boy, our POV sure is lingering kind of ominously on that paper cup of water in the last panel, and you know what would be extremely funny, to me? If, after we spent all this time learning that Justin’s reluctance to seek medical attention for what was obviously a serious health problem had its origins in his mother’s own irrational fears, Rex hands Justin that water and he drinks it and then the water just leaks out everywhere because the terrible, substandard surgery performed on him at the bottom-tier hospital where Rex has admitting privileges has left the poor boy’s digestive tract full of holes. “My mother … was right!” Justin would gasp out, right before he dies from all his organs becoming unmoored from the places where they’re supposed to be.

Hagar the Horrible, 4/9/18

I believe I’ve shared on this blog before the fact that in sixth grade I accidentally spilled a pot of boiling Lipton’s Giggle Noodle Soup onto my foot. This was an extremely silly-sounding injury that earned me the derisive nickname “Noodlefoot” for the remainder of the school year, but it was also an extremely painful second-degree burn that I had to keep dressed in a bandage for months! I still have visible scars, more than thirty years later! My point is that while Hagar and Lucky Eddie are yucking it up there on the battlements of whatever castle they’ve managed to seize by brutal force to use as a temporary base for yet another plundering expedition, the men below are screaming in pain as their flesh sizzles and sloughs from their bones.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/9/18

Ha ha, it’s funny because, even in moments of quotidian happiness, Cindy is obsessed with with her age and the decline of her good looks! Cindy, you might recall, was the pretty cheerleader character from the high-school-days origins of Funky Winkerbean, and the strip has never stopped punishing her for it, having her fired from her newscasting job for getting old, after which she didn’t file the obvious lawsuit, but instead started both working and sleeping with young people so she would always be reminded of her encroaching cronedom. The Funkyverse is all about generalized anxiety over mortality, of course, but you have to love the way Cindy’s been saddled with a particularly gendered version of this where she’s constantly convinced that she’ll be unattractive and unloveable any day now, and by “have to love” I mean “you don’t have to love it at all, feel free to get pretty upset about it, actually.”

Mark Trail, 4/9/18

I’m pretty sure that Marlin and Jim drove up in that jeep, so, unlike what happened with a couple of boats we could mention, this is one hilariously awesome vehicle wreck that won’t go on Woods and Wildlife’s tab!

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Dennis the Menace, 4/8/18

At first I was going to say “I can’t believe I actually have dedicated mental energy to this,” but obviously I have a blog about comic strips so it’s pretty obvious that I would dedicate mental energy to this, so let me pose the question to you, the reader: doesn’t Dennis’s grandpa look kind of off-model here? He usually doesn’t have glasses and his hair isn’t usually doing that in front and, perhaps most importantly, he usually looks kind of smug and self-assured, like he does here. Anyway, the reason I’m going through this whole thought process is that today’s strip never actually identifies this man as Dennis’s grandfather, which means that maybe he’s just some random old man feeding Dennis cookies for his own no doubt horrifying purposes, and who has been caught and punished in possibly the least effective manner possible.

Gasoline Alley, 4/8/18

Gasoline Alley isn’t always hip to the latest trends, but today it’s here to tell you that there’s a third dimension now! Crazy, right???? I’m mostly posting this comic to point out that Gasoline Alley is extremely scrupulous about respecting the intellectual property rights of Magic Eye, Inc., who, though they would appreciate being referred to, falsely, as “today’s rage,” would probably be angry if their brand name were put above the “puzzle” in the second-to-last column, not least because you can stare it all you want and nothing 3-D is going to happen inside your brain.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/7/18

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen exactly one episode of the 1967 Dragnet revival in my life, but its plot is burned into my brain. Friday and Gannon try to bust a ring of hippie drug freaks, with one of said freaks, a bearded intellectual who thought his friends had “gone too far,” serving as an informant. They do manage to make the arrests, but not before one hippie couple’s two-year-old daughter tragically drowns in the bathtub, because her parents were neglecting her while high on [dramatic music sting] MARIJUANA. Then, at the end of the show, the informant shows up at police HQ and he’s gotten a haircut and shaved his beard and is wearing a suit, and he announces that he still holds to his ideals but is going to get a job as a journalist and work to change the system from the inside. That’s all I can think about looking at Justin here. Sure, it took a terrible disease and a mother so paranoid about doctors that it’s almost certainly a diagnosable disorder, but the important thing is that his hair isn’t hanging over his god-damned ears anymore.

Mary Worth, 4/7/18

I would of course never deny you the pleasure of seeing Wilbur singing along with Willie Nelson in the shower, but I also want to make sure you realize that that shampoo ad from earlier this week finally roused him from his depressed squalor and convinced him to, for the first time in presumably days or perhaps even weeks, bathe.

Mark Trail, 4/7/18

I love that Marlin looks more outraged by this development than anything else. “He’s going to ram the jeep! The very jeep I’m sitting in! Why, the nerve!”