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Blondie, 8/7/21

Elmo’s friend — and look, probably, somewhere deep within Blondie HQ, there’s a whole character chart with a name and a backstory for this kid, but he’ll always be just plain “Elmo’s friend” to me, like if you try to tell me what his actual canon name is, I will simply refuse to listen — is visibly upset in the second panel, and honestly, who can blame him. Elmo’s relationship with Dagwood is weird and off-putting! “Who is this strange adult man?” he seems to be thinking. “Why did we interrupt his nap? Why is he standing here while we’re about to get into the pool? Should I tell my parents about this?”

Pluggers, 8/7/21

At first I, drawing on my own incipient experience of pluggerdom, assumed this was a joke about creaky backs and hips, and then considered that it was probably a much less charitable fat joke. But I would love it to be just a kind of general plugger musing on mortality. “Not sure I want to sit down,” the bear-man thinks, eyeing the chair warily. “Never know when the old ticker’s gonna give out. Do I want it to be in that chair? Not sure it’s dignified enough.”