Post Content

Quick reminder: If you’re interested in getting an ad-free version of each day’s blog post emailed directly to you every morning, you can now subscribe to the Comics Curmudgeon Newsletter for just $3 a month! Sign up and read more details here.

Blondie, 4/3/21

Not sure why but I’m very fixated on the choice to do a pink-to-blue gradient in the background here. Specifically, I’m very curious as to whether we’re looking at sunrise or sunset. Typically, Dagwood and Mr. Beasley the mailman crash into one another as Dagwood runs out the door in the morning to catch his carpool, but that usually happens because he’s running late, so it seems unlikely that our notorious snoozemeister would be up and around literally at the break of down. Mostly I’m curious as to whether the madness Mr. Beasley is displaying in today’s strip arises from beginning-of-day manic enthusiasm or end-of-day exhaustion verging on psychosis. I’m sure I could comb through hundreds of Blondie strips looking for clues as to the geographic orientation of the Bumstead home to determine whether we’re looking east or west here, but I’m proud to report that I’m not quite at that level of comics obsession.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/3/21

Man, this strip always does its best to extract grim laffs from its characters’ economically desperate situation, but “Snuffy begs Doc Pritchart to freeze his face into immobility with off-label botox, giving him a marginal advantage in the games of chance where the few circulating dollars in Hootin’ Holler are passed back and forth among the town’s impoverished residents” is really on another level.