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Mary Worth, 8/9/18

Oh, man, not only does Tommy think that his remaining on the straight and narrow is entirely a result of a choice not to sin, but he also thinks his ability to keep making that choice is entirely dependent on his relationship with Brandy, a woman for whom substance abuse has painful emotional resonances! Literally nobody has been in a better or more secure position in his recovery than Tommy right now, I’m pretty sure.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/9/18

Do you get that, everyone? A couple days after the wedding, if you get Mindy’s drift … nudge, nudge. Mindy’s drift is that she wants to spend a couple days after her wedding enjoying some vigorous sex with her new husband before she goes to the Pinball Hall of Fame! Unfortunately, her new husband has previously been defeated by stairs and had to be hospitalized after becoming dehydrated from walking around a comic book convention, so I’m afraid some bitter marital disappointments are looming.

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/8/18

So Funky has to go get Holly’s mom in Florida for complex reasons that I’ll probably have to explain at some point if I want to make fun of this strip in the next several weeks but let’s just set them aside at this point, and he’s leaving his dumb stepson Cory (I think he’s his stepson? I’ve never actually been clear on this point) in charge of Montoni’s while he’s away. I’m assuming the joke here is that Cory is trying to relate to his stepdad using awful wordplay, which is the preferred method of establishing intimacy in Westview, but Funky is just getting madder and madder because he never liked Cory and he never will. But it would be much funnier if Cory were trying to convince Funky to roll out his million-dollar idea for a new product, “Pizza Cake,” which the family then sinks all its money into promoting only to discover that Cory has just accidentally reinvented Chicago-style pizza and none of the right-thinking citizens of northeast Ohio want anything to do with it.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/8/18

Our fellas are laffin’ it up, but they’re also expressing a genuine frustration about life in Hootin’ Holler: in the absence of a widely accepted system of impartial justice, disputes in this hardscrabble region are settled by the power wielded by interlocking kinship groups, and frequently escalate into violent feuds. Lukey and Snuffy live in a world where no relationship with another person is allowed to be merely tepid or neutral: either someone is your dearest friend who you would defend, literally, to the death, or a hated enemy who must be defeated, all based on an argument that happened in a saloon three generations ago.

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Hagar the Horrible, 8/7/18

Eddie, I’m sorry to report that, while ants don’t have organs that are homologous to human ears, they do have what’s called a subgenual organ, located below the ant’s femur and tibia leg joint, that can detect vibrations and thus help the ant detect and interpret most of what we think of as sound. If it makes you feel any better, though, ants can’t understand language, not even cruel insults, and neither do they have the sort of grasp of cause and effect that would allow them to construct a weird narrative loop where you come up with an answer to the question meant to shield you from the cutting response to that very answer.

Mark Trail, 8/7/18

Wow, Rusty’s finally figured out that maybe people don’t like it when you “translate” their weird foreign name into your language when you talk to them? But in case you’re worried this strip is getting too “politically correct,” it only occurred to Rusty that Jo(s)e was Mexican when he became comically sleepy.

Dennis the Menace, 8/7/18

There’s nothing more menacing than acting out not because you’re angry, not even because you’re cruel, but because you’re a bottomless pit of need and can feel no emotion other than a thrumming voice that yells WHY AREN’T THEY LOOKING AT ME.