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Mary Worth, 1/27/18

Mary Worth has definitely been setting up the Great Muffin Caper for a while now, with Mary offering up her signature pastry to console the whole Weston clan, both father and daughter, in their times of trouble over the past year. The ones Dawn got last fall were ID’d as carrot muffins, but I’m not sure what the later ones we’ve been seeing are supposed to be, and there may not be a canonical in-universe answer, what with the writer, artist, and colorist all being different people, but they sure look like chocolate chip cookies, right? Which leads to the next obvious question: what if you made something that you called “muffins” but they were actually chocolate chip cookies shaped like muffins? That would be delicious and a differentiating piece of intellectual property that could definitely make you rich, once you’ve successfully farmed out production to a country with low labor costs and a relaxed attitude about what sort of preservatives you can legally put into baked goods.

Shoe, 1/27/18

A cool thing about writing a syndicated comic strip is that you can be momentarily stirred by a vaguely erotic premise that doesn’t really have a punchline to it, and then, bam! 15% of your job for the week is accounted for!

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OMG HERE’S THIS WEEK’S FUNNIEST COMMENT

“There’s far more interesting story that we’re not being told in Blondie. Dumb kid with fighting parents, boring. Who stole Blondie’s voice, and what sort of quest they’ll send her on to recover it, that’s a good tale. I’m thinking Dagwood sold her voice to the Devil in exchange for free food.” –Voshkod

WE LUV U RUNNERS UP!

“The police wrist wizards in Dick Tracy are large because of the integrated hi-res body cam. The recordings are used not in court cases, though, but in a weekly game show in which a prize is awarded to the cop dealing out the best, most imaginative violence to criminals.” –Gerry Quinn

“I really think this strip should consider changing its name to Least Of All, Spider-Man.” –pugfuggly

“I usually think of malapropisms about habitual lawbreakers as the Snuffy Smif beat, but I guess for this set up to work the characters have to be able to read.” –matt w

“Max Mouse is reciting a crime puzzle while balancing on a log in front of a fire with his shirt off. This is the weirdest key party ever.” –Glod Gloddson

“Save room for dessert! We’re having Giant Bowl of Flour!” –Peanut Gallery

“Ted Miller is an anagram for ‘red millet.’ Clearly Mary is getting tired of sharing bland white flour with Jeff, and is ready to cook with an alternative grain, if you know what I mean.” –BigTed

“Wow! Snuffy Smith today perfectly illustrates the Atlantic article I just read about the idea of food deserts. Despite her botanical knowledge (and possibility of reaching a Whole Foods by broom? Maybe?), her food choices reflect her locale and culture and are deeply entrenched.” –Janna L., on Twitter

“I just love that Granny Creeps is buying blonde hair dye. I can imagine her back home in her hovel, surrounded by glass jars full of grotesque animal parts suspended in some nasty liquid and staring at her green visage in a cracked looking glass. ‘Y’know what the fellers would find fetching? Blonde tresses!’” –Joe Momma

“‘Meet my Mary‘ indeed! Because don’t we all have a Mary, in a very real and muffiney sense?” –Hopester

“When the forces of earth move outward to conquer the rest of the solar system, I hope we attack the asteroid belt with Mark’s battle cry on our lips, ‘Remember the dinosaurs!’” –seismic-2

“How timely! Ripped from today’s headlines: Mr. Dithers calls Marlene into his office to watch him masturbate.” –handsome Harry Backstayge, idol of a million other women

“Dagwood engages in some teen-text-speak of his own. MFGBL in this context is clearly Make Facebook Give Bumstead Likes. If it weren’t for me keeping up with the hip kids of today, you fellow ‘mudges would never learn these cool, new things. You’re welcome.” –Hogenmogen

“‘What totally bored person would even care about what I do?’ is a little too on-the-nose for a meta-comment about the Blondie strip.” –nescio

“Blondie has a long tradition of Mr. Dithers abusing Dagwood for not working. Those lazy workers, amirite? But today we glimpse the real truth — it’s not like the boss actually does work for his money either. He just hypocritically blames his subordinates. I say this subversive deconstruction of our class system is long overdue in newspaper comics, and if it has to be disguised as a joke that doesn’t quite make sense, so be it.” –pachoo

“The likelihood that Doc is yelling into the phone at his AA sponsor makes this the saddest Mark Trail ever.” –Where’s Rocky

“I’m guessing that mirror behind the Keane parents is actually a two-way mirror, confirming my suspicions that the Keane Kompound is actually a long-running psychological experiment.” –Andrew

“Bil reads the paper aloud as Thel tries to interpret the news according to the Book of Revelation.” –lumaca morente

“For at least a decade (probably two), Radiohead have been more into droning ambient electronica than any catchy rock stuff that anyone might scream at. I’m pretty sure that in keeping with Marvin’s themes of awful humans doing awful things, Jeff and Jenny just spent the whole evening yelling ‘PLAY CREEP’ at the top of their voices to spoil everyone else’s enjoyment of ‘Lotus Flower.’” –Schroduck

“The contact lenses Mary uses to hide her yellow snake eyes appear to be slipping out of place in that first panel. Is she preparing to unhinge her jaw and consume Ted Miller, the latest sacrifice brought to her by her faithful high priest Dr Jeff? Find out next week on Mary Worth: Snake Goddess.” –Truckosaurus

“Smash cut to Mary and Ted trying to drum up venture capital for their muffin business while a 28-year-old dead-eyed investment banker asks them how they’re going to connect baked goods to an app. ‘Like Uber for muffins!” Ted desperately blurts out.” –Dan

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Marvin, 1/26/18

As I’ve noted at least once in this space, there was a Sally Forth storyline in, I think, the mid-to-late ’00s when there was a flashback to Ted and Sally meeting in college and Sally is wearing a Sonic Youth t-shirt. Since I had been reading Sally Forth since I was Hillary’s age, her parents were canonically the same age as my parents, so the idea that Sally in college liked a band that was hip among my own cohort was a shattering blow to everything I held dear about my own age/hipness/relationship with adulthood/etc. But that was years ago, and I’ve long made peace with both the concept of comic-book time and my own ongoing slide into middle age, so I’m not alarmed to learn that the super-square parents of the syndicated comics’ worst baby attended a concert of a band who had a monster hit song 26 years ago, even though liking that band had been a marker of a certain avant-garde sensibility at the time, back when I was in college. Anyway, the sting is mitigated a bit by the fact that the dialogue here was obviously written by a space alien or near-sapient computer program that tried to imagine how a human would describe going to a rock concert, and came up with “screaming” (?) until your “jaw is sore” (??), which is technically correct but also profoundly off.

Mary Worth, 1/26/18

Oh, it looks like five-term Massachusetts Senator John Kerry Ted Miller’s boredom with retirement now has an outlet: turning Mary Worth into the muffin queen! You’d think that the current playing field for baked goods — dominated by massive industrial bakeries at one end and gourmet local boutique pastry shops at the other — represents a market that has pretty much shaken out, but Ted, who used to be a salesman of some indeterminate nature at one point, thinks Mary and her kitchen can produce enough lucrative muffins to make both him and her (but not, pointedly, Dr. Jeff) wealthy. Mary’s already posing for the label in the first panel!