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Beetle Bailey, Blondie, and Shoe, 9/4/24

Look, we’d all like to believe that works of art spring from the pure, isolated genius of their creator’s mind, but when you’re talking about a commercial and ongoing project like a daily comic strip, obviously the whole thing ends up being affected by the desires and needs of your audience. You gotta give ’em what they want! The creators of legacy strips are acutely aware that the “’em” in this case is “old people” and what they want is news they can use, like “Ha ha, there sure are a bunch of crazy ‘social media’ sites these days,” “Hey, did you know that you can make money on playing video games? Maybe that grandson of yours isn’t such a screwup after all,” and “Tired of pissing yourself? Well, here’s some unexpected good news!”

Six Chix, 9/4/24

This blog is itself a work of art in dialogue with its audience (literally, given the comment section), and apparently what you want is my funny, erudite, and occasionally lengthy riffs on the strips, which I’m happy to deliver! But it is my blog, after all, and sometimes what I want out of it is to just post a strip I read today and say “I don’t like this”, so here you go. Today’s Six Chix: I don’t like this!

Dennis the Menace, 9/4/24

Many years ago, an ex of mine had to go to traffic school to get points from a moving violation taken off her license. At the time, there were various kinds of theme schools you could go to, and she signed up for something that billed itself as “comedy driving school.” After her class, I asked her how it went, and she said, absolutely steaming mad, that “Someone needs to tell that guy that there’s a difference between being funny and being in a really good mood,” a formulation I think about all the time. Anyway, someone needs to tell the Dennis the Menace team that there’s a difference between being a menace and wasting everyone’s time because you’re one of the dumbest people alive and have no filter or sense of embarrassment about it!