You don’t want to know what a pain it is to get that giant button through the hole
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Shoe, 9/27/24
I guess if all you want to get out of the daily comics is to briefly linger on each little joke and then move on to the next one, you might be satisfied with today’s Shoe, where they spin up up “disagree with” as a metaphor for indigestion into a matter of geopolitical importance. But me? The Comics Curmudgeon? The guy who’s blogged about comic strips for decades? I hopefully do not have to explain that I am the kind of person who wants more than that, and after lingering on this joke slightly longer than most would, I have decided I do not care for it. I think it’s the “not only” at the beginning of the first word balloon, which implies that that the second half of this sentence is going to be something new, rather than just an extension of the metaphor. Plus it invites you to contemplate how the peppers got there, suggesting the “ramming [X] down my throat” formulation that is one of the least pleasant phrases in political discourse. So, sorry, Shoe, I’m not on board today. Do better.
Blondie, 9/27/24
Easy for you to say, Dagwood: unlike your wife, who only puts on her formal clothes before a big date night with you, you go through the trouble of putting on your elaborate tuxedo in the morning, before leaving for the office, a place where you wear a tuxedo, for some reason! I guess making your carpool wait for you is preferable to making your spouse wait for you, in terms of keeping the marital peace.
54 replies to “You don’t want to know what a pain it is to get that giant button through the hole”
RMMD:
“So I’m not stuck with this forever.”
“Well, no. Eventually, you’ll pass away.”
MW:
“For someone like Ed to lack remorse makes me lachrymose. So to speak.”
FC: Bil pauses as he enters the yard and wonders who blasted their fig tree.
Welp, Hurricane Helene decided to knock out my power so I’ll be very sporadic today.
Blondie: Like hell does Blondie take longer than Dagwood to get ready. I would say it’s because of her hair but like her sparsely haired husband, she’s been rocking that style for a century now. At this point it’s probably cemented to her head.
MW: Estelle, you moron, you’re missing a prime opportunity to get back at Ed for not showing up to your dinner. It’s not like you’re actually an employee or even care about the animals so you wouldn’t be fired for not showing up. Then again, you can’t expect much from someone who walks their cat outside on a leash as if she needs to go to the bathroom outside just like a dog.
MW:
See, Sheila See saw what she couldn’t see, so now she’s riding a seesaw of emotions.
H&L: Before you deride this strip as having the lamest joke on the funny pages today, please consider that Ditto is saying this because he’s drunk. He’s certainly is drawn that way. A drunken Ditto making lame puns probably right before upchucking on Chip’s guitar is quite humorous, in a curmudgeonly sort of way.
You know what would be fun? A crossover, in which Estelle and Ed get marital advice from Edda and Amos.
Blondie : This old trope.
Look, Dagwood qualifies as “ugly” because of those hair antennae, that weird flesh pocket around his neck, and his legs that bend inexplicably BELOW the knee*************
Crankshaft : …we didn’t need the ENTIRE flashback for this. Heck, Crankshaft should have answered it like this right away ;
Lillian : You’ve been awfully quiet, Crankshaft.
Crankshaft : I was just thinking… I’ve been illiterate nearly my whole life… Only learned to read a few years* ago… Missed out on so much because I couldn’t read… SO I’M NOT GONNA TAKE IT WHEN SOMEONE TELLS ME I CAN’T READ SOMETHING!
*Sliding timescale.
************
Luann : …Tiffany already knew this. She already knew this because she exploited Les’ feelings towards her so she could prolong her convalescence when she broke her arm (because she was afraid of returning to the ‘Manse’). She already knew this because she had developped RECIPROCAL feelings towards him when she met him when Gunther took her to meet Irma and Mr Gray.
…SO WHY IS SHE GETTING THE VAPORS AT THIS “HOT GOSSIP” (“A CRUSH”!? WHAT ARE THEY *TWELVE*!?) WHEN IT’S SOMETHING SHE ALREADY KNOWS!? AND HAS TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF BEFORE!?
*************
Shoe : Birds are immune to capsaicin.
Mary Worth: Dr. Ed’s wants to get married to you, Estelle. The Busby Berkeley-esque wedding extravaganza is what’s killing his buzz.
Pluggers: You’re a plugger if by the end of the vacation you have to use the wide angle lens to fit your carb-bloated body into selfies.
@Baja Gaijin: The way Estelle is acting, she thinks that she only has a week to plan the entire thing. Weddings take far longer than that and what she wants (an animal themed costume ball because she hasn’t emotionally matured past the age of eight) would probably take a year at best.
Shoe: I like how the Perfesser bows his head as if he’s really traumatized by it. “It was terrible: gastric explosions everywhere, innocent meat and vegetables fleeing to the colon, kernels of corn separated from their cob…”
Blondie manages to keep things fresh by taking an old, worn out premise and, uh, removing any kind of punchline? I think that’s what happened here?
Chix (sic): “I’m worthy of love.” Not the worst come-on I’ve heard as she stares into her friend’s eyes.
Mary Worth shatters my suspension of disbelief by reminding me that Ed was held up by a crisis at work and Estelle works there too. In Mary Worth Gaiden Ed is fuming about how Estelle is at the engagement dinner instead of helping with the damn puppies.
Cranky Funkershaft: Uh, Ed? No one was telling YOU what you can and can’t read. This was supposed to be about Les’ student’s. I wouldn’t expect you to know that though, since you’ve only taken any sort of role in this little caper in the past week. (Seriously, where’s Les? Did no one think to call the person who’s singularly repsonsible for all this? Did he sleep right through this “shocking” turn of events?)
JP: ‘Yes, Declan’s father is taking a nap…’ [mutters] ‘a dirt nap….’
SF: Inviting herself and her insane family to spend two holidays with a relative who’s just set herself up with a small business that’s likely to be heavily patronized during said holidays, and is going to be stressed out the whole time? This is our protagonist, ladies and gentlemen. This is ‘Luann’ levels of Inner Beauty we’re seeing here.
MT: So Jules has picked part Dick Tracy (alliterative named villain), part Luann (create new villain when old villain is too good to be a foil), and part Judge Parker (plot point out of nowhere). Now, where and when did we see that the Society was owned?
@The Quiet Man, SF: Jackie will probably have her go-to pop-up assistant do all the work. And Jackie is used to a Holiday Rush when two people come to the store on consecutive weeks.
FC-Good grief!
Blondie-Well Blondie is catering the event after all. Can’t have an event of any kind without food.
CS: Cranky Ed: “Nobody’s going to tell me what to read and what not to read!” Also, Cranky Ed: “This book is garbage! Who could read such crap?!”
DT: The anticipated trap is sprung, but I was expecting Diet, Mysta, and the rest of the security team, not Dick Tracy who is supposed to be investigating the brewing race war in the city. For him to be here at all is straight-up narrative cheating, and it’s not even in service of something interesting. Mysta is the one who has unresolved business with Ro-Zan and has the powers to be evenly matched with him. Meanwhile, Dick has already defeated Ro-Zan with his bullshit plot armor and has now magically intuited himself to this location to do so again. It’s so boring.
JP: As a reminder, Neddy has read a very recent full CIA background-check dossier on Declan and his family, so she should already know if Declandad is dead or divorced from Declanmom or in prison or something similar. Then again, the full investigative powers of the US government apparently uncovered nothing about the big embezzling scandal that Declan’s family was at the center of, so really nothing is off the table.
MW: It sure was nice of Mr. Al(l)ora to install light poles on the Path of Platitudes just for Estelle’s walk tonight. Enjoy them to the fullest, because they’ve never appeared before and they’ll almost definitely be disappearing from the future ambulatory anguish affairs of the Charterstone chumps.
Luann: You can age the Luann cast out of middle school, but you can’t age the middle school out of the Luann cast.
MW: Estelle passes the humping land clams as she sobs bitterly, blindly following the path around a curve to discover Dr. Ed canoodling with his client, Ms. Fitz, on a park bench.
Speaking of the WHOLE flashback of the “Crankshaft missed out on becoming a star pro baseball player because he didn’t know how to read” :
Part One: I like how Skip Rawlings decides to write a fawning hagiography about the raging old asshole who karened into the Centerville Sentinel’s office because his newspaper got wet when HE watered his lawn (breaking a watering ban!)
Part Two: …is it just me, or does Beanball Bushka’s design look more like a younger Crankshaft than the character that’s meant to be a younger Crankshaft?
Part Three: Crankshaft bitterly reminisces on how he missed out on his one big opportunity because he NEVER learned how to read, and promises to himself that even in his advanced age, no matter how long it will take for him to learn how to read, he WILL do it, spurred on by having read an article in the newspaper about what could have been had he-
Wait. Crankshaft got the idea of learning how to read… by reading an article in the newspaper. He read it in the newspaper… BEFORE he learned how to read.
Shoes Off! — I guess getting the word “cleansing” in the second panel was inevitably going to be a little controversial . .
MW: We have a couple of people who walk their cats in my neighborhood here in Chicago and one lady who walks her ferrets. In no way am I actually trying to normalize this, to be perfectly clear, just saying that yeah, these people do exist.
They’re all complaining about someone named Ed too, which is the really weird part…
Ohhhh, Dagwood’s looking at his watch in panel 1, and – as I first thought – not checking out his wife’s ass. (In panel 2, he is absolutely 100% checking out her tits, though)
Crap, crap, crap. I overslept this morning and don’t have time to make a proper joke. Fortunately, so did the writing team at Shoe, it seems.
MW: Estelle, if you want Ed to care about you, grow a tail and walk on all fours.
CS: Ed settles in with his book. “It was a pleasure to burn,” goes the opening line. “Oh yessss,” Ed moans. “Oh God yessss!”
Now I’m really curious about just how long it takes for Dagwood to do whatever is going on with his hair.
SlylickFox and Comix For Kinx: Today’s artist did a great job on that drawing of John Belushi, no snark.
CS – “Sure, I’m still an asshole, but at least I’m an asshole who’s against totalitarianism.”
Shoe: For her part, Roz has skipped the peppers and gone straight to magic mushrooms, the only way she can deal with the Perfesser on a regular basis.
Six Chix: Tuesday Chik is mad that another Chik is stealing her “I’m all depressed” shtick and isn’t even employing the whimsy of giant bread-based foodstuffs.
GT: So what we have this week is a random assortment of Rod Whigham’s Greatest Drawings? I guess? Anybody?
Blondie: Dag’s also sporting his finest Army belt buckle.
9CL – It’s good to see this strip rediscover its roots with “everyone sits around discussing how hot Edda is”
FG: Bones Malone! What an amazing coincidence.
Really, you two should just fuck already.
Shoe – Perfesser undersold this joke. “Severe border dispute” sounds like something the UN is hearing about in arbitration. Go all the way into the gross body humor (We’re engaged in mutually ASSured destruction!).
Blondie – It’s already established that Dagwood and Blondie are still horny for each other after years of marriage. Unlike other comic strips like Shoe, who use clip-art, heavy lidded looks to the audience, and various off-panel substances to get by, these two have decided to use a rather bland “Women take forever to be ready” premise as a way to show off Blondie’s hot bod.
Will this dabbling in exhibitionism lead to the strip challenging 9 Chickweed Lane for horniest newspaper comic? Is it aiming to move from the collapsing newspaper industry into a smart TV-MA send-up of family comics and their tropes? Are they simply hoping a horny fan-art and fan-fic community springs up to keep the property alive and relevant? Who knows, but The Lockhorns are eyeing this warily, because their syndicate may decide they need to throw about their mutual spite and pretend to like each other.
Frazz is good today. (Checks window for flying pigs)
JP: ”Mr. Declandad will not be joining us because he’s serving twenty years in San Quentin for a murder he never committed. Tell your fascinating hot friend to come in, too.”
Shoe: “We have always been at war with Capsaicin.”
Blondie: “Just like a slow-roasted beef brisket.”
“I’m worth the wait?” Sorry Blondie, there’s only space for one worth in the comics page and that’s Mary Worth
(Reading post title then first comic) Josh, NO (continuing on to second comic) oh
9CL: As always, Amos has nothing to say about whether Edda was a talented or a dedicated dancer. All he remembers was that she looked hot.
Frazz: Frazz is a walking A-Bomb flash.
Luann: OMGee!
CS: I’m going to say something nice, here: At least this wasn’t a week of Les Moore bloviating about book banning.
Blondie – I’m frankly just impressed that is isn’t frequently falling over, disproportionately top heavy, as she is.
“So there’s this guy, see, who always wears the same clothes with one big button in the middle. No one ever sees him without it. Even his wife! He tells her, he tells people, you can never unfasten this button. And she wonders. She lies awake next to him at night, looking at the button, touching the button, obsessing about the button. One dark night, as he’s asleep in a sandwich coma – what? oh, he likes sandwiches, really big ones, and they put him to sleep, like a snake, look, that’s really not critical to the story and . . . well, I thought it added color . . . fine, she undoes the button and his clothes and skin slough off into a heap revealing a welter of undigested food around a black hungry maw that never stops chewing, happy? You ruined it. Fuck off.”
MW: I’d still take this over a week of Les Moore bloviating about book banning.
Zits: Et tu, Pierce?
FC: That was an impressive throw, if Jeffy got the plane into the tree from his front door. I’d suggest he try out for baseball, but, alas, his illiteracy will keep him from stardom.
Don Abundio, translated:
“Oh! Another article about illegal spearfishing!”
“I don’t see what the big deal is about killing a few fish”
“All right! Here’s a big ugly one!”
@Ukulele Ike:
Frazz did a rare comic where it’s about something actually relatable and one of the two insufferable leads as the butt of the joke, instead of smugly mugging to the audience of fans about their shared sense of superiority over other people
RIP Dame Maggie Smith.
LUANN: “OHMIGOD! The guy who’s been sexually harassing me all throughout high school has ‘a crush’* on me! Les, the guy who’s feeling I took advantage of for a prolonged stay at his house while injured, has ‘a crush’* on me? Can you imagine?!? The guy who is just usually so subtle and shy about speaking his mind? Anyway don’t spread it around, because a random guy having ‘a crush’* on me is totally something college kids would care about!”
*This most assuredly isn’t the term Les used, but this is a “family paper” featuring people who are 20-going-on-12, so…um…yeah let’s go with “crush”.
@Philip: “Lucky for me, the dad from Dustin has that covered, so I don’t have to do it this time.”
CS: At this point, I want to see Ed Crankshaft, Lillian, Les Moore, and Dinkle get into a fistfight for control of the story. Complete with Batman-style sound effects. “No, this story is about my illiteracy!” (kaboom!) “No, it’s about my brave decision to keep running my unlicensed bookstore despite suffering a tiny brush fire!” (smack!) “No, it’s because Lisa died!” (punch!) “No, it’s about my 11-volume autobiography!” (pow!)
@Anonymous: Does the Ugly Guy Hot Wife trope apply in a comics world where absolutely no recurring guy is drawn as attractive?
I do appreciate how the two of them dress up for date night about once a week, and pretty well dressed up (at least compared to my wife and I). I will chalk that up to their stylized appearances not really having changed for some nine decades, but it works for the Blondieverse.
@Weaselboy: Normally I’m all about the Even Evil Has Standards trope–one of the best iterations is in Rocketeer, where the gangsters join the feds in shooting at Nazis and everyone has a “huh, weird” moment before going back at it. Leave it to Tom Batiuk to ruin for me.
@TheDiva: Joker also has his limits when it comes to Nazis, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a riff from “The Rocketeer”.
Prayers/good vibes/whatever works best for you to southeastern US Mudges. Hunker down, stay dry and stay safe!
Blondie: Women, amirite? They take FOREVER to get ready! It’s as if they’re held to a much higher standard of personal appearance than men and are inundated with messages that tell them their value is directly correlated to that appearance, so they spend a lot of extra time and money trying to live up to that impossible standard! What’s up with that?