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Mark Trail, 5/29/18

“That must be why she likes your son, who certainly isn’t human, and probably isn’t a plant or a fungus. Not sure about that last possibility, though, I’m not a scientist!”

Beetle Bailey, 5/29/18

I love Cookie’s expression of hooded-eyed satisfaction in the second panel. “Heh heh, at last, years of having a bookshelf full of books I never open has paid off, as I finally got to unleash that absolutely sick bit of wordplay I’ve been saving up for just this moment.”

Mary Worth, 5/29/18

This will almost certainly turn out to be a parade of nobodies brought in to sing Wilbur’s praises, but it would be really funny, to me, if they’re just planning on luring him to a third location where they can execute him, gangland-style.

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Beetle Bailey, 5/28/18

The character design in Beetle Bailey is extremely stylized, which is actually fine and not anything to complain about, it’s a cartoon, for Pete’s sake, though I will say that if anything a little too much attention is generally lavished on the ears. I mean, why draw the head as a basic oval but then spend a lot of time getting the details of all the little cartilage nubs inside the earlobe correct? Why make two characters where the distinguishing feature between them is that one of them has cauliflower ears? I guess it’s all been leading to this moment, this moment when an amiable, popular, long-running newspaper comic strip takes a sudden and nauseating left turn straight into nightmarish body horror.

Hi and Lois, 5/28/18

I guess that’s supposed to be the Flagstons’ occasionally glimpsed elderly neighbor at the lower right there, but since Memorial Day is of course as we all know a holiday set aside to remember those who died while serving in the armed forces, and the day where we honor the living for their service is called Veteran’s Day and is in November, I choose to believe that that’s actually a ghost, sadly watching these civilians enjoying their three-day weekend and not remembering the reason for the season, which is to say him. That explains why he’s standing in the yard but nobody seems to notice him, and why his words are depicted in a thought balloon (ghosts cannot be heard by the living, obviously). “Ah ha,” you’re saying, “But Josh, why is he old? We don’t as a rule send the elderly off to die in wars!” Well, jokes on you, buddy: your assumption that we live on eternally young in the afterlife is obviously flawed. This guy probably died in Korea or Vietnam in his 20s and his spectre continued to age, much to his horror. “Maybe if I can will these living souls into remembering me, that will keep me young,” he thinks. Sorry, soldier! That’s not how the universe works, apparently! Enjoy growing older and older, forever!

Dick Tracy, 5/28/18

I’ve lived in California for close to four years now, and I gotta say: palm trees? Hot tubs? Attractive women of varying ethnicities? 58 counties, representing a uniquely powerful form of local government, often weilding more influence over our day-to-day lives than the administrations of our better-known cities? You sure have the “west coast lifestyle” pegged, Dick Tracy!

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Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/27/18

To be somewhat serious for a minute: when I joke about the grinding rural poverty in Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, which I do a lot, I hope I’m making it clear that my intention is make fun of the callous contrast between actual rural poverty, which is still very real and very grinding in the year 2018, and the weird “funny” play-acting version of rural poverty in Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, much of the iconography of which was developed during the vogue of hillbilly humor that was at its peak when this strip’s action pivoted from the big city to Hootin’ Holler in 1934. The characters are for the most part relatively untroubled by their circumstances, and, in a tradition that goes back through Sanford and Son all the way to ancient Greek comedies, are often depicted as being wiser and more content than their more sophisticated and less impoverished contemporaries, when they occasionally encounter them. Every once in a while, though, in some of the incidental background gags of the strip, you get a glimpse of something really depressing, like the fact that the Smiths live in a single-room shack with different ad-hoc living spaces created by patched curtains hanging from the ceiling. Or today, where the “joke” of the throwaway panels is that the Smith home has a leaky roof and so on rainy days their children are wet and miserable, even when they’re inside. That’s not a joke at all! It’s actually incredibly sad!

Mary Worth, 5/27/18

[earlier that week, in Mary’s apartment, Ian and Toby are reading off of scripts Mary has provided]

TOBY [haltingly]: Congratulations. We love … reading your work.

IAN [extremely sarcastic]: Fabulous news, my friend. I especially like your “Success Stories.”

TOBY: And I…

MARY [interrupting]: No, Ian, it’s “Survival Stories,” not “Success Stories.” We have to make him believe you actually read it. Do you want him to throw himself off a cliff?

IAN: Honestly, I’m of two minds about that, Mary…

MARY: Zip it. You’re going through this charade or I post to the local Nextdoor everything you’ve confided in me over the years. Capisce?

[sullen silence]

MARY: OK, take it from the top. And it wouldn’t hurt to smile a little.

TOBY [way too loudly]: Congratulation! We love reading your work!