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Mary Worth, 2/8/24

Move over, “celler door!” There’s a new most beautiful two-word phrase in the English language, and it’s “odd rock.” “Race you to that odd rock up ahead!” is a very normal phrase that native English speakers say to one another under all kinds of circumstances and there’s nothing strange or off-putting about it. Anyway, that odd rock definitely isn’t wide and flat, like an altar, and it definitely won’t be soon bedewed with the blood of the heretic Keith, with Kitty holding the obsidian dagger aloft while Sonia and Brad chant ecstatic praises to the Dark One who commands them. Some might say this is a situation that could’ve been avoided with a more timely DNA test, but I’m not here to judge.

Family Circus, 2/8/24

Damn, Dolly, I’m pretty sure PJ hasn’t grappled with the fleeting impermanence of life yet? This isn’t the fun kind of darndest thing to be saying, at all!

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Six Chix, 2/7/24

I said my piece a while back about why I’m not the biggest fan of cartoons about hell, but you know me: I can’t resist looking at a comic and thinking about the world-building, even in cases, like this one, where the world is hell. I’m kind of intrigued by the fact that the dude on the left here has one puff of chest hair on his otherwise smooth torso. Do the souls of the damned continually regrow their body hair, only to have it burn painfully off now and then as the temperature of the hellfire varies at random?

Pluggers, 2/7/24

This is a pretty subpar Pluggers in the sense that the plugger in the panel isn’t contributing to an overall joke or even giving us any new information over and above what’s in the caption. Feel like the dog-man should either be saying something jokey like “I want you to have my Lawrence Welk albums if I don’t make it” or just going all out with “They’re going to gut me like a fish, Bob! No, I’m not going to calm down!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/7/24

“Your nephew? Your nephew!?! You’re telling me that if your sibling has a son, that person is considered part of your family, and there’s even a special word you use to identify them? Holy shit, this changes everything.”

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Hi and Lois, 2/6/24

God, this one is super bleak. Lois has convinced herself that, sure, things are tight and they can’t afford to order pizza very often even though the kids are always whining for it, but what if she just learned how to make it herself? And what if the kids learned to love that even more than the crap from Dominio’s? “Mom’s homemade pizza,” they’d call it, and it would be a fond childhood memory they’d carry with them the rest of their lives, something they looked forward to, not a marker of her and Hi’s failure to provide them with what they really wanted. This fantasy lasts mere seconds into the children’s’ actual encounter with her malformed, fucked-up pizza, and look at her face — she is devastated.

Family Circus, 2/6/24

Jeffy, meanwhile, has been abandoned by his parents and is being forced to clean the house himself even though he’s a toddler, and he’s doing fine. “Noooo, Jeffy, you’re screwing this up, do you even know what cleaning is” Dolly whines in the background, but Jeffy doesn’t care. Look at that face. Cool competence and determination. He’s thriving for the first time in his short, dumb life.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/6/24

I often think that contemporary middle- and upper-class Americans create a culture of child safety that’s unprecedented in history, with children monitored at all times well into their teenage years and not given space to explore or gain useful life skills in ways that will be really damaging down the road. But then I see strips like this and think maybe there’s something to it.