The Comics Curmudgeon

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Comment of the Week

I'm really uncomfortable with the way Truck is breaking the fourth wall here. 'Are you this guy's father? You, the reader? Well, if I remember my Roland Barthes then, yes, indeed, you could be described as a metaphorical parent to both of us...’

—Spunky The Wonder Squid
195

Wednesday quickies

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Hi and Lois, 7/16/25

Hmm, if you have to apply, it isn’t really Trixie’s pre-school yet, is it, Hi? Really makes you think (about how modern child-rearing is an agonizing treadmill of chasing status that starts at birth and has no end in sight).

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/16/25

“Whoever he is, tell him to meet me at the crossroads and I’ll beat him in a guitar-pickin’ contest! Then I’ll be your dad!”

Pluggers, 7/16/25

Ha ha, you can’t fool me, Pluggers! “Go home” implies that pluggers are going someplace else in the first place and you know I don’t buy that.

195

Interpersonal relations and their discontents

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Pardon My Planet, 7/15/25

My least favorite Pardon My Planets (which is really saying something) are the “Ha ha, gender relations, amiright folks?” ones, but I gotta say I kind of enjoy the face on the diamond salesman here. He’s like “Ah shit ah fuck this is going south fast, I gotta … I gotta not be here. How can I get out of here without them noticing. Think, man, think.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/15/25

Oh no! Truck’s maybe-son is, like his maybe-dad, a journeyman session musician who hasn’t even gotten the financial benefits of a viral TikTok hit, so he had to shell out for the discount DNA service where you just get back the raw data and have to do the analysis and comparison yourself. Excited for a week of sweaty Googling and increasingly puzzling interactions with ChatGPT!

Mary Worth, 7/15/25

“Now, I, a sixtysomething man, don’t experience emotions at all, of course. Like remember the time you cruised a guy at his own mother’s funeral and then made up a pretext to temporarily dump me so you could date him? Or all the times you rejected my marriage proposals? Or the time you banished me from your condo by taking in a cat? I didn’t feel anything about any of that stuff when it happened, and I definitely don’t feel anything about it now! Ha ha!”

196

Somewhere in time

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Andy Capp, 7/14/25

The question of “When does Andy Capp take place” is increasingly fascinating to me — characters are on modern dating apps but also they dress … like that? … which seems pretty old-timey to me. Today’s strip in particular feels like it belongs to an age before the UK Parliament passed the Licensing Act 1988, back when alcohol could only be served at pubs from 11:30 am to 3 pm and 6:30 pm to 11 pm. This explains the reference to Andy’s “afternoon nap”; presumably he routinely stumbles home at 3 o’clock pretty soused and passes out on the couch for hours. Normally he’d be up and around to go back for the evening session, but I guess he overslept today and has missed out on hours of the precious “aimless drunkenness in the presence of non-wife people who he likes or at least whose names he knows” time that makes his life worthwhile bearable.

Hagar the Horrible, 7/14/25

Ha ha, that got a little dark! Anyway, speaking of placing comics in context, you know I’ve long been fascinated by when exactly Hagar the Horrible takes place over the evolution of Viking culture and society, but the where matters as well. I’m reasonably sure it’s been made explicit in-strip that Hagar lives in Norway, which means that his world faces out to the North Atlantic. His Swedish cousins have established extensive trading routes through the Russian river systems with the Byzantines and Abbasids, so they have access to the delicious spices of the east, but Hagar’s Norse compatriots haven’t gone far enough south of Greenland to discover genus Capsicum, which means that in his mind “hot wings” are just wings that are currently or recently on fire. Sad!

Hi and Lois, 7/14/25

When Hi referred to “your honey-do list,” I briefly thought that we were turning a traditional sexist cliché on its head here, but nope! It’s just a joke about Hi feeling wounded and unappreciated — or in other words, “classic late-era Hi and Lois,” which around here we do respect.