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Hi and Lois, 4/19/26

I get that “cartoon dad must escape from his nagging family” is a time-honored trope, but I think the specific gripes of the Flagston clan are just way too dark for the way he nopes out of there to be comical. Lois is at the end of her rope, spending all day showing beautiful homes to her clients and then coming home to a collapsing hovel; Chip has suffered some otherwise undocumented heartbreak and is still devastated; the twins, who should be each other’s best friends within the family, have become implacable nemeses; and Trixie, like all addicts, can no longer get satisfaction from the sun as it is and demands a hotter and brighter star no matter what destructive effects that might have on our planet’s ecosystem. Based on Hi’s huge grin and rosy cheeks in the final panel, I assume that he’s “getting what he needs” thanks in part to a bottle of bourbon he keeps stashed in the glove compartment.

Blondie, 4/19/26

Look, I’m not a pickleball guy, but … the whole point of pickleball is that it’s basically ping pong scaled up to be played on a tennis court, right? Like … why aren’t the DithersCo layabouts just playing ping pong. They already have a ping pong table in the breakroom, I guarantee they have the paddles and balls somewhere. And if Dithers allows the ping pong table in the breakroom, why is he so mad about people using it? I enjoy the little illustration he made, which may be part of a whole wider collection of plausibly deniable Dagwood furry art, but I still think he’s in the wrong here.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 4/19/26

You know the whole thing in vampire lore where if you throw rice in front of a vampire, they have to stop chasing you to count the grains? Well, apparently this deli-owning dog thinks if you give Slylock a math word problem to solve, he’ll turn his ratiocination to figuring it out and won’t notice that you’ve enslaved and dismembered your fellow sapient animals to stock your shop. It didn’t work, though, and he’s going to jail, along with all of his customers.

Beetle Bailey, 4/19/26

Oh, Beetle, you’ve really done it this time! You remembered the Sabbath day, but you forgot to keep it holy! Can’t even imagine how much KP you’ll be doing for this, in hell.

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Beetle Bailey, 3/29/26

The last panel here fills me with nothing but contempt. Apparently the only way they could think of to visually drive home that Sarge had pizza at bedtime was to put a pizza box in bed with him, but then they put it in a wildly unrealistic position (open? on his thighs?) and drew it without any identifying features so it looks like a laptop. Beetle is there to deliver the necessary information anyway. The rest of the strip is fine, definitely not the most unpleasant dream sequence the strip has ever done.

Mary Worth, 3/29/26

OK, I joked yesterday about how maybe dumb old Harvey isn’t the one we should be sympathetic with in this scenario, but if “Trixie” actually manages to escape his awful enslavement thanks to the outdoor privileges he earned scamming Harvey, I think we genuinely have a moral dilemma on our hands here. And who knows, maybe “Trixie” will track down Harvey and tell him the full story and offer to help make him whole to the best of his abilities. And maybe they’ll fall in love! Dare to dream!

Blondie, 3/29/26

Hey, do mild stimulants help you get more productivity out of your workers? For a little while, anyway, is what Dithers just found out. Back to the drawing board! Let’s take that “mild” out next time, maybe!

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Hagar the Horrible, 3/24/26

I make a lot of jokes on this blog parsing various anachronistic clues trying to figure out where Hagar and his crew are plundering and pillaging at any given time, but … it’s generally France, right? Like, that’s where Norse raiders mostly went in real life, descending on a civilization on the Continent that was wealthier and more advanced than theirs but that had begun to politically unravel as the heirs of Charlemagne fought each other for territory. Today we see a surprising result of this type of cultural contact: one of Hagar’s men, who apparently was getting off on what he thought was an act of sexual dominance over the regional nobility to match his warband’s military success, is clearly devastated to learn that he’s become entangled in what the locals refer to as “an arrangement.”

Beetle Bailey, 3/24/26

This strip actually got me to look up what the experience of a limb “falling asleep” actually is, and I thought it had to do with blood flow but apparently it primarily arises from nerve compression that just cuts off sensation from the affected area altogether. And Beetle is like, wouldn’t it be great if my whole body was cut off from my brain completely? If I were nothing but a pure mind, untethered to physical existence? Killer’s facial expression is appropriate: he is not buying this and neither am I.