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Archive: Hi and Lois

186

Facial expression theater

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Dustin, 6/26/25

I really love the fact that Ed looks utterly joyless as he prepares to shove that forbidden donut down his donut hole. He doesn’t even want it, really; he’s just eating it to make some kind of point in his long-running battle with his wife that she’s never even going to find out about.

Pluggers, 6/26/25

This plugger, on the other hand, is gazing upon that expired can of beans with a keen expression of mingled trepidation and desire that borders on the erotic. Surely there are some risks worth taking, he thinks. Is botulism really such a terrible way to go out?

Hi and Lois, 6/26/25

Obviously Dot and Ditto did not enjoy Hi’s bedtime story, so I have to assume that the big smiles on their faces indicate that, in the moment just before they slipped off into unconsciousness, they realized that finally they weren’t going to have to listen to any more blather about fucking golf.

150

Dads, but no grads

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Blondie, 6/15/25

The Blondie deep lore is that back in the ’20s, Blondie was a flapper girl and Dagwood was the dissolute son of a millionaire, and he was disinherited for marrying her, and that’s all of course long forgotten now and they’re just normal suburbanites, but it is a little weird that Dagwood’s boss looks suspiciously like his long-vanished father. It’s weird, right? I think it’s kind of weird. Anyway, it’s even weirder that this strip is drawing attention to it, though I’m not sure if the implication is that Dagwood sought out this abusive boss in particular to work out his daddy issues or if something much more complex and dark is going on here, a scenario in which Dagwood’s father has taken on a whole new identity that can never be acknowledged just so the two of them can spend time together.

Dustin, 6/15/25

Obviously, Ed was never going to spend Father’s Day with Dustin, whom he profoundly dislikes. But I appreciate that today’s strip reminds us that really his entire family is just a nonstop source of multilayered shame for him.

Hi and Lois, 6/15/25

Why are you subjecting Thirsty to all this, Hi? This is exactly the kind of thing he opted out of fatherhood to avoid!

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What’s the matter, Hi? Are you afraid of the possibilities

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Hi and Lois, 6/7/25

Years ago, I was doing some PT for a few weeks, and at one of my sessions there was an older guy there who was rehabbing a knee injury, and his therapist was (gently) berating him because he kept going back and playing in his softball league despite the fact that she hadn’t cleared him for it. He was agreeing with her in a kind of hangdog way — he knew it was bad for his knee, but it seemed clear to me that his softball team was a big part of his social circle and missing games meant missing an important part of his life. I felt bad for him at the time, though I might need to revise that now that I know that a big part of senior sports is getting together and pissing in groups.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/7/25

Oh, man, remember the shitty motel where Truck had to isolate for days due to a viral respiratory infection in the spring of 2020 that somehow turned out to not be COVID? And then he wrote a song about it that went (the good kind of) viral? Well, it turns out his bastard maybe-son is staying there now, and there’s no way he doesn’t know that whole backstory, so now I’m assuming he’s documenting this entire journey-to-find-his-father for TikTok clout.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 6/7/25

You ever think about the fact that, before he became a real boy, Pinocchio’s flesh was all wood? You ever think about how creatures that eat or peck or chew on wood would do a real number on Pinocchio, if he encountered them? You ever think about how Pinocchio wasn’t technically in the Wizard of Oz, but we could put him there, through the magic of cartooning?