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Beetle Bailey, 4/13/18

Just about every name in Beetle Bailey is extremely on the nose (Corporal Yo! Private Blips! Tech Specialist Chip Gizmo!!!!), with General Halftrack actually having one of the more subtle monikers. The half-track is of course a perfectly legitimate piece of military hardware, but I’ve always assumed that it was short for “half-track mind,” implying that he was losing it, a notion this strip, in which he hears a phrase that reminds him of golf and then wanders over to a tee with a glazed expression on his face, even though he’s miles away from a golf course, sure isn’t going to disabuse anyone of.

Marvin, 4/13/18

Every once in a while I need to check in with Marvin, and myself, to see if maybe I’m exaggerating when I do my running joke about how Marvin is a vile comic strip that constantly and opening makes scat jokes in family newspapers across the country. In today’s strip, Marvin farts and then announces that he’s about to shit his pants, which will be much more disgusting, so, no, I’m still on target, actually.

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Gil Thorp, 4/12/18

Hey, guys, remember Aaron Aagard, the hero of last year’s basketball season storyline, who was inconsistent not because he was on drugs but because his mom was, and then he ended up living in a teammate’s basement? Well, he’s playing on the team again this year, it seems. I guess we’ll never know the details, since all media coverage of the Mudlarks has now ceased, which should hopefully break the spell the various high school teams have over Milford in short order and everyone else will get hobbies and Coach Thorp’s budget will get reassigned to the music department and Coach Kaz will have to mortgage his dojo.

Mark Trail, 4/12/18

Based on Mark’s grim facial expression in the final panel, I assume he knows that Jim was crushed to death under the jeep, and is going to allow Marlin to mourn in private. If there’s one thing Mark doesn’t like being around, it’s emotions.

Mary Worth, 4/12/18

I’m not sure what sort of stuff Rick’s sells, exactly, but I’m certainly hoping that Iris and Zak are here to buy, say, a hammock, talking loudly all through their shopping experience about how it’ll easily be converted into a makeshift sex swing.

Crankshaft, 4/12/18

Fun fact: True Crime Addict is a real book, and James Renner is a real person who’s been rendered here relatively faithfully, presumably because he owes someone a terrible debt, or perhaps because he lost a contest.

Spider-Man, 4/12/18

That quote is from the Bible, so in attributing the inerrant word of YHWH to some unspecified “they,” JJJ is proving himself a darn polytheist on top of everything else!

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Gil Thorp, 4/11/18

Well, it was bound to happen: the Social Justice Teens are feeling kind of bad about defeating Marty by goading him into cussing on-air. You’d think they’d take the attitude of “Yay, the sports radio guy who literally nobody liked even before we found out he was a racist isn’t going to be saying rude things about our friends on-air anymore!” But these kids sense, at the periphery of their minds, that they are in fact the current protagonists in an ongoing narrative; and while in real life we actually enjoy getting what we want, within a story a protagonist without an antagonist is dull and lifeless, and they know it.

Mary Worth, 4/11/18

Mary Worth, obviously, doesn’t feel itself restricted by such conventional narrative niceties. Sure, the current storyline of Wilbur’s mid-grade ennui appears to lack dramatic tension, drifting as it is from a little shower singin’ to some light shoe purchasing. But in fact the true interest to the reader is the nature of the story itself: is something actually going to happen one of these days? Or when we picture the future, should we imagine Wilbur thought-ballooning while shopping at various chain stores, forever?

Family Circus, 4/11/18

Generally speaking the circumstances in which you’d eat off a tray like this are that you’re eating dinner in front of the TV, which is literally every child’s fondest wish, so it seems weird that Billy is so outraged here. The prissy face really sells it, though. “Mother, not only are we watching televised entertainment rather than earnestly discussing our day over dinner, but the lack of a table means that there are no arbitrary rules of etiquette to enforce! This is sheer anarchy! Also, I dropped a lot of whatever this green goop is on the rug.”