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Mary Worth, 3/19/18

Hmm, how does Mary Worth fare on the suddenly very relevant Soap Opera Comic Museum Verisimilitude Test? Well, significantly worse than The Phantom, which meticulously reconstructed a room at the Met for its protagonist to ruminate sourly in. It turns out that Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is in the Uffizi just to the left of the same artist’s Pallas and the Centaur, and not, as today’s Mary Worth would have you believe, next to Some Trees Or Whatever.

Spider-Man, 3/19/18

Oh, man, remember the tense drama that arose in this strip when, for for reasons that were explained in only the sketchiest of ways, Bruce Banner could no longer turn into the Hulk? Well, good news: now he can turn into the Hulk again, with no attempt to explain it at all.

Crankshaft, 3/19/18

Don’t get your hopes up, people. Last year’s Funky Winkerbean strip where we finally had it confirmed that Crankshaft’s moldering husk is still technically alive in the ten-years-ahead section of the Funkyverse’s fractured chronology wasn’t just weird and distasteful; it also robbed us of even fleeting moments of anticipation that Crankshaft might actually die in his own title strip.

Dennis the Menace, 3/19/18

The vision of a child stuffing cookie after cookie into his mouth from a trash can infested with chittering vermin as he mutters “Still clean enough, still clean enough for me,” is … uh, menacing, yes, let’s say that.

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Hi and Lois, 3/18/18

A lot of previously underground gay subcultures have become pretty well known in recent years to the American mainstream, but that doesn’t mean that the mainstream always fully “gets it.” For instance, “Thirsty” Thurston is many things, but he’s not a bear. He’d have to be a lot hairier, for one thing.

Family Circus, 3/18/18

“Thank goodness, Dolly finds reading incredibly boring! It’ll be much easier to keep her from seeking out knowledge from outside the Keane Kompound this way.”

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Spider-Man, 3/17/18

This Spider-Man storyline hasn’t exactly been covering itself with glory when it comes to even vague gestures towards scientific plausibility, what with the limb regrowth and the blood transfusion musical chairs. And this is of course a strip that routinely refers to spiders — the species at the core of its whole shtick — as insects. Even so, I’m particularly appalled by today’s installment, which appears to imply that Bruce Banner is a reptile. Why, just because the Hulk is green? First of all, not all green life forms are reptiles, or vice versa, and second, Bruce isn’t even green right now, jeez.

Pluggers, 3/17/18

Ha ha, remember that old guy who always refused to buy a cell phone and said “Why would I need to spend the money on one of those things? I’ve got two dimes in my wallet!” Anyway, he’s dead now. He ran out of gas and he died of exposure on the side of the highway.