Grim Wednesday
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Between Friends, 1/29/25
Really kind of depressing that in every panel where we see the Blonde Between Friends Friend’s face here, her facial expression is nothing but grim resignation. She’s not actually getting any joy out of keeping this egg tray. She’s not happy the world is like this, or that she’s like this. But she’s not getting rid of the tray!
Blondie, 1/29/25
I guess it would’ve been a little on the nose for Blondie’s flashback to show her and Dagwood actually saying the phrase in question in their vows, but it’s a little unnerving to instead see them just staring ahead and simultaneously visualizing a big sandwich while the minister blabs on about what Jesus wants their relationship to be like or whatever. Dagwood is doing this because he’s just thinking about big sandwiches all the time, but Blondie … well, I’m not sure what’s going on with her, whether she’s trying to psych herself up to get married to a Big Sandwich Guy or if she’s thinking about spending the wedding night making big sandwiches to feed to him, sexually, or what. Anyway, this wedding sadly cannot hold a candle to the time Dagwood’s parents got him hepped up on ether and tried to force him to marry Blondie’s roommate.
Alice, 1/29/25
Oh, also, Alice has gotten dumped by her boyfriend, a grown man (?) who dresses like a comical child, which has to be pretty embarrassing for her. This is a lady who’s been kidnapped by aliens and flirted at by air conditioners but I have to think she sees this as a low even for the context of the strip.
135 replies to “Grim Wednesday”
Blondie-I feel like Dagwood constantly eats is to cover up all the pain he goes through on a daily basis. Gave up his family’s wealth to marry Blondie and now he is forced to work in an office where he suffers daily abuse at the hands of his boss.
MW-Ah yes. The ever promise of muffins.
FC-Granddad put a ship in the bottle and booze in his gut.
Between Friends:
“Sentiment is not based in practicality, Harv. That’s why whenever I see the inert, cold, steely, lifeless egg tray, I think of Grandma!”
Whoa whoa whoa, Alice bottom caption. I nearly got whiplash there! “The root of the problem”?! You’re almost metaphorical! This is way too abstruse so early in the day. Stay in your lane, Alice bottom caption, and just give it to us nice and slow, and — this should go without saying — redundantly. Based on the action (?) in the main panel, I expect nothing more from you than “It’s you.” Maybe — maybe — “You’re right. It’s you.” Don’t be getting so crazy on us. Confused people don’t laugh, am I right?
JP: Hey Randy, that’s OUR line!
MW: Shoot, have we missed Dawn wandering around imagining she was DawnWoman, the perfect girlfriend who always makes her boyfriend happy, while oblivously shoving old men into oncoming traffic?
CS: After two and a half weeks of interviews, spread out over two different trips to Montoni’s, we’re just now getting to the part where the famous cartoonist becomes a cartoonist.
MW: Dawn should be able to reasonably manage muffins- although there WILL be cleavage crumbs.
RMMD: How many Glenwood losers must we meet until Summer runs into that unexpected, unlikely, but totally undeniable Right One?
DtM: Is the less-cartoony mailman from another dimension or is there a federal Don’t Mock the Postal Service mandate?
H&L: Baby…crayons…huge blank wall. Seriously?
9CL: Waste of time (noun): Reading this blather.
MW: Mary offers Dawn a chocolate muffin, but only one. “I’m cutting you off, my dear. It’s become clear to me that you are hopeless. I’m not going to waste my time, effort, or ingredients on you even one more time. After all, I have a reputation to uphold. I’m certain of this much: You. Can’t. Be. Fixed. Oh, and that goes for your endearingly quirky dad, too.” Mary sprinkles shredded paper into a small pile on the table. “That’s what’s left of your lease, my dear. You’ll have to move quickly, because I have a new tenant arriving on Sunday. And don’t spill water from that aquarium. I don’t want whatever is left of that damned goldfish stinking up my carpet.”
JP: I know I’m expecting logic from a Judge Parker plot, which means I’ve already failed, but how can the police have footage of a murder that happened in the woods? Trail cam? Did Alan set up cameras on every tree for security and somehow never review his own footage in all the weeks he spent harassing diner customers with his daughter’s picture?
Blondie: 80 years later, and it’s a punchline related to Dagwood’s later obsession with, well, Dagwood Sandwiches.
Back in the day, it was a big deal. A very big deal. And if the blogger is correct, that’s how we got Bwad & Toni and the Foobpocalypse.
Blondie: “I vow if you cheat on me, I’ll stick a sword upwards into your stomach so the point enters your heart. Much easier than going through the rib cage.”
There was no easy way for Blondie’s assistant to get behind the counter that quickly UNLESS SHE PHYSICALLY PASSED THROUGH! She’s an incubus, Blondie — run while you can!
MW: Muffins. Madness. MARY!!
Alice:
Mr Boyfriend didn’t want to hang around with a literal airhead.
@Banana Jr. 6000, CS: Thor smirks, “But is he really?”
Context? In Alice? Don’t be absurd, man! You might as well ask for natural, flowing dialogue in Judge Parker or philosophical reasoning in Six Chix, or a second side to the faces in Alice.
@Chance: I maintain that the bottom caption in Alice is not there to summarize the strip, but to remind the addled artist of her topic for the day.
Mary Worth: Serious question–does Karen Moy hate women? All the females in this strip are terrible whiny losers who act like they deserve their loserhood, or should have their every whim catered to.
@Little Guy:
Funny how she remembers the preacher as so much shorter than he was. (I can forgive the clothing alterations as necessary to the sliding timescale.)
Between Friends: “And yet it’s here taking up space.” Really a master class in passive aggression.
Blondie: I’m pretty sure that, when the time came to say his line, Dagwood blurted out, “I sandwich!”
Alice: Not to be insensitive, but are they both dying of something horrible? I don’t know how this strip works.
Blondie: The marital vows are of course the central part of the service, in which the happy couple promises to be true and faithful to one another, and around which the rest of wedding is built as an elaborate blessing. Or, in this case, as a vehicle for food porn. “Love one another as this ridiculously stacked and undoubtedly non-kosher sandwich has first loved you,” the priest intones, “And what Sandwich has brought together, let no one forget to dip in horseradish sauce.”
Bonus quote! OK so Blondie’s employee… does she have a name? did she exist before this strip? she must be pretty new because surely Dagwood’s Katamari-like appetite is the first thing you hear about at Blondie’s shop and I had to search for Katamari because my brain kept saying “tamagotchi,” boy I’m losing it, also it took me three attempts at a search before I could find it ABORT ABORT ABORT
Blondie’s employee wisely doesn’t attribute “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach” but apparently the sentiment was perhaps first expressed by John Adams and put in its final form by Fanny Fenn. And the other day my wife and I were talking about “An army marches on its stomach,” which is often attributed to Napoleon and sometimes to Frederick the Great but which seems to have been made up and attributed to Frederick by none other than… Thomas Carlyle, the author who gets wrongly credited with “He who has hope has everything” as discussed in the 01/08/25 post where Josh officially mentioned the team of BrainyQuote investigators in the comments! Making me feel free to indulge in nonsense like this! (That one turned out to be attributed as “Arabian proverb” in the 19th century by Tryon Edwards, a quote compiler who never sourced anything and whose parents are going to be very surprised when I travel back in time to murder their baby.)
Between Friends: Constantly asking the use of an object is a prime feature of an over-developed rationalism that fails to recognize that sentiment — maintaining the connection between the living and the dead — is the usefulness of the sacred and talismannic deviled egg tray. Embrace the essential meaninglessness and futility of our lives, Harv! Experience the deeper connections that emerge from it! Or, you know, throw the damn thing away when she’s not looking.
Oh, it’s the root of the problem because Twinkletoes’ mug is filled with root beer, and somehow this is the bit of immaturity that pushed Alice over the edge into the final bust-up. Uncharacteristically manful of Twinkletoes to admit he’s at fault.
Anyway what’s wrong with Blonde Friend? Deviled eggs are awesome!
Alice has realized that Phyllis Diller Meets Peewee Herman isn’t a good couples aesthetic.
***
Blondie is trying to get in on this whole Inception fad with a visualization of a visualization. I hope in a few years as that other woman is telling a co-worker about a past job, we get her visualization of this scene with both other visualizations intact.
H&L: Makes sense that a nonverbal toddler would prefer to eat their crayons off the floor rather than one at a time out of the box.
GT: “Britney Sears is up next against Christina Aguilero, it’s a real grudge match, but the winner gets the Justin Timerlake Trophy!”
Between Friends – The charcuterie board fascination is due to end, and creating a new means of serving small dishes of snack foods for social events is ready to happen. Repurposed single-function dishes inherited from grandparents would be the perfect mix of nostalgia and unconventional functionality to make a new trend happen.
But this isn’t really about a deviled egg tray. It’s about a creator of a long-running comic strip that has lost any love for her creation, but cannot part with it because no one is buying new comic strips. Things go on not because of love, but because of bitter sentimentality. Which fits the current times we are in and makes this strip relevant.
Blondie – The original version of this strip was Dagwood being asked by a nameless coworker what the secret to his marriage was, and Dagwood going on an extended metaphor based around the Dagwood sandwich, it’s ingredients, and preparation. That, of course, sent Dagwood and the hapless coworker on a whirlwind orgy of dining that killed the unprepared coworker, leaving his fiancée a widow before her bachelorette party.
Alice – Alice’s hope of pivoting the strip toward being a Lockhorns rip-off failed when her boyfriend was just too tired to even bother coming up with basic cruel responses to Alice’s foibles, and Alice only mustering a schoolyard taunt in response.
Don’t worry though, this comic isn’t going anywhere as long as there is syndication. The second it makes sense is the moment it starts to die. It embodies Hunter S. Thompson’s famous description: “One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”
GT: “Amazing job by both wrestlers…But in another, more accurate way, Britney is the winner!”
MW: Dawn pours her heart out to Mary while absent-mindedly nibbling on a muffin.
“SOB! Oh Mary, I’m such a total failure!”
“We all know that, dear. Now for God’s sake, wipe those crumbs off your face! Jeez, no wonder Dirk is grossed out.”
FC: Jeff reminds the audience that as present strip artist Thel arrises from his mind freshly born like Pallas Athena and there’s nothing Oedipal about reworking his father’s drawings of her at all!
CS: Skip uses a pizza slice to conceal another edible he just snuck into his mouth, as Batton drones on.
“Skip, are you getting this all down?”
“Huh? . . . Oh yes, of course. Yes. I have . . . uh, a photographic memory. Yes, that’s it. Please continue. Oh look, what’s that behind you?”
MW: was Dawn happier before meeting dickwad or after meeting him? All he is to her is arm candy.
Between Friends – When Mr. Cat and I got married, I used the little zapper gun at Crate and Barrel to put a deviled egg plate on our registry. He saw it and pulled a Harv on me. Chagrinned, I removed the deviled egg plate. When he went back to work on Monday, he was kvetching to a female colleague about the “weird” items I had tried to register for.
Three days later, I received a package from the female colleague. It was a deviled egg plate, with a note that read “Of course you need a deviled egg plate! Men just don’t understand.”
Do I make them often? No, but I do make them*, and I use my plate with joy.
I did draw the line. When my mother died, I let her gorgeous cut-glass deviled egg plate go in the estate sale.
*Curry. A pinch of curry with the yolks makes them so freaking good.
MW: Mary solves Dawn’s sloppy eating problem by switching her to M&Ms.
Blondie: That evening pastry chef Maya imagines what a sandwich based marriage would look like and does some research on the net. Comes across strips by Xunise of Six Chix. “Oh, hell no!”
Mark Trail: Does… does anyone under age 35 even know what a chat room is?
RMMD: This is the guy from Summer’s first date, right? “Hey, glad I ran into you. I have an update on my classic car restoration!”
GT: Um, Henry, getting pinned is not doing an amazing job. Winning on points in overtime might be, but not getting pinned. But you do you.
FC: “Granddad”??? Who calls their Grampa Grandad? Does he call him Grandfather on formal occasions?
@Philip: Oh, I think the coworker was prepared, if you know what I mean. (I mean that Dagwood cooked and ate him.)
Blondie: The lady Blondie is talking to here might just be the first black person I can recall ever seeing in this comic AND she has funky hair highlights. She’s a complete anomaly to the weird idealized 50s whiter-than-white suburbia world that Blondie and Dagwood have been stuck in for nearly a century. The implications are staggering.
@BeckoningChasm: If I had to guess, I’d say Moy is one of those women who identifies as “feminist” because she believes that the penis is the root of all evil, and women need to be constantly protected and sheltered from the wicked, lustful ways of men because they’re incapable of helping themselves. It’s basically medieval patriarchy but repackaged for self-described “girlbosses.”
MW Mary : “Because if modern American TV advertising has taught me anything, it’s that only women eat chocolate, and usually in slow motion.”
So Alice has been dating Angus Young all these years and has lost interest due to his aging decline from rock demon to a mere imp? It’s a good thing he’s been playing hard rock all these years and couldn’t hear her callous dismissal, or he’d be really hurt. He’s actual quite a sensitive guy.
@Cleveland Mocks: I don’t know what’s worse: Skip’s inability to make his interview subject get to the point, Batton’s inability to have a point, Tom Batiuk’s inability to make a fictional retelling of his own life the tiniest bit entertaining, or the syndicates’ inability to cancel this self-indugent crap.
@ectojazzmage: I think she is supposed to be South Asian.
In today’s Alice, we learn that Alice has been a long-time groupie for Cheap Trick’s guitarist, Rick Nielson. Unfortunately for Alice, their relationship seems to be coming to an end.
Today’s Alice might have been funny – OK, that’s a lie, but at least interesting – if Alice had been leaning on a square root symbol instead of a capital Pi (?). Or she could have made a comment about an infinite product, I suppose, and kept the Pi. Or maybe Alice just is never funny. It’s probably that. Sorry for the digression.
BF: Apparently the grandmother’s estate was so cleared out that the only memento left was the egg plate. I’m not sure if this is the result of a large, covetous family, years of debt accrued by elder care, or just a really efficient Swedish death cleaning.
Josh, just wanted to say thank you for bringing Alice into our lives. As a long time reader, sometimes I think I’ve seen it all in the funny pages, but Alice proves to me that actually I know nothing and I’m an idiot. For years we’ve seen instances of comics that don’t really add up or make sense, but now I’m realizing, maybe they never had to! It’s kind of like hearing grunge for the first time.
Yeah, my Mom has an old rickety chair that is falling apart.
She refuses to get rid of it, because it’s “a family heirloom” and “has sentimental value”
It’s a broken piece of junk.
MW: Shows how the artwork goes hand-in-hand with the dialogue. If the artist pulled back far enough to show Mary’s bloomers down around her ankles, today’s strip would have a whole different vibe.
Shoe: Stoners all over the world are highly amused by this strip. Everyone else, not so much.
Blondie – “I promise to enable your food addiction.”
Dennis the Menace: It would be interesting to find out just how much the porn industry going mostly online has actually affected the Postal Service who used to have to deliver a lot more subscriptions of adult magazines and other physical media. I know that Netflix was once a huge customer when they used to send their DVDs in the mail but now all they do is the digital streaming service.
C’shaft: And yet you still whizzed it down your leg.
Dustin: Leave it be, Dustmom. The heart failure is taking too long; a car accident will be nice and quick.
GT: I’m not sure if you can do an effective radio play-by-play for wrestling, but this is definitely not it.
HotC: Uh-oh, I smell a Freaky Friday ripoff…
JP: Judge Parker exists in this weird universe where institutional corruption happens, but somehow it mainly happens to rich white people.
Luann: A solo shopping trip in Tokyo sounds like the most interesting thing to happen to a Luann character in years.
MW: Karen Moy does know that being vegan means eschewing dairy products (aka an essential component in 99% of all standard baked goods recipes) too, right? Or did Mary make an entire batch of vegan chocolate muffins for the sole purpose of pinning Dawn down and meddling her? (What am I saying, of course she did.)
Phantom: “YES! Finally I can prove my manhood by beating up on some brown people!”
I’ve got news for Pluggers. They don’t need binoculars. They need that cataract surgery they’ve been putting off. Why do Pluggers look at captions anyway? They don’t watch any furrin pitcher shows that aren’t in Amurrican. They can always turn up the volume on the shows they watch.
BF – Bitches be crazy – eh, Harv. Funny, funny stuff….
Blondie – Have you ever motorboated a blueberry pie….
Alice – It not you…it’s the human condition…my dark karmic burden…the Akashic record…the Illuminati….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
@Chance: #3
I know…I first read the caption as “The square-root of the problem” and was expecting to see some calculus-related hilarity, but re-read it and then expected to see some botany-related hilarity (“root” – get it?? ha ha ha!!) but no…there is absolutely no connection (to my mind) between the caption and the actual cartoon. It is just so discombulating. Not even my morning coffee can help me make sense of this. But my angst is nothing compared to the agony of Picasso, doomed for all eternity to apply his artistic genius to churning out lowest-common-denominator comics like this…
Over 50 comments in and nobody has pointed out that it is Curmudgeons’ Day? I guess we are all so curmudgeonly that we refuse to celebrate those sorts of “holidays”.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a test object my grandmother used to induce trypophobia in us.”
“Oh, yeah, Grandma Skinner was a hoot.”
Blondie’s roommate Irma is a pippin! I’m not convinced Dag made the correct choice.
GT: Distant memories of the old Boys’ Wrestling Room in my high school gym are of a small, closed-off, windowless area that smelled really bad. I shudder to imagine the stench of a Girls’ Wrestling Room….not, shall we say….fresh.
Alice – It’s not him. It’s the cartoonist.
Don Abundio, translated:
“I love driving around with the whole cheerleading squad”
“And fortunately, reckless youngsters will try anything”
“Now don’t start forming the pyramid until we get up to highway speed!”
Well, we can’t agree on much as Americans these days, but I think we can all agree that Dagwood totally fucked their wedding cake.
JP – Today on Pissyface Theater: This strip never mentioned this woman in the decade I’ve been following it, and when she did turn up she was presented as a grifter. It’s expecting a lot to think readers will give one shit about Ann and/or anything that happens.
Mary Worth – While the muffins were baking, Mary was putting Post-It notes all through her Big Book O’ Platitudes.
Rex Morgan – Credit where it’s due: I chuckled at the guy in the background with the man bun.
Crankshaft – We’ve reached the point in the story where Tom pats himself on the back. Wait till he talks about the Pulitzer nomination. It will be a self absorbed, self congratulatory ego trip.
It was not worth twisting my neck to see the sideways crap.
Arlo & Janis – When we were cat sitting, the cats came running like this when I opened a can of chickpeas.
Looks Good On Paper – Becky and Skip should be there.
Between Friends – I followed this for a while around six months ago, but after we returned from a vacation I didn’t pick it up again. I enjoyed the story about Slut Friend working in Paris, but I couldn’t get interested in the other two women. In fact, I disliked the blonde woman. It doesn’t help that the artwork is similar to FOOB. That must be a Canadian thing. I don’t know if I’ll start reading it again.
A quick reminder to infrequent Blondie readers that the new character you may be seeing here for the first time is Maya, introduced last year with great fanfare by the syndicate. Just goes to show that, at least in the comics world, a fanfare ain’t what it used to be.
What a Frazz hole:”…..and some people serve coffee that’s been pooped out of a cat!”
@Cleveland Mocks:
CORRECTION — GT: Um, Henry, getting pinned is not doing an amazing job.
WinningLosing to a heavily favored opponent on points in overtime might be, but not getting pinned. But you do you.Jeez, I Henryed that all up.
Between Friends: Deviled eggs are basically undeconstructed egg salad. They come from an era when mayonnaise was its own food group, but when seasoned correctly, they’re quite delicious. Serve them on a regular flat plate, and your guests will gobble them up just to keep them from wobbling.
Blondie: “The way to my man’s heart is through his stomach,” said Blondie, as she fed Dagwood more ham, pastrami and pie, then took out another life-insurance policy.
Pluggers: Small TV screen? We live in an era when you can get a decent 65-inch set for $300 from Walmart or Target, and don’t tell me pluggers aren’t taking advantage of that! (Also, I’m pretty sure he bought those binoculars to aim at his cute neighbor’s window, so let’s not talk about them ever again.)
Alice: Some of us have a command, however faltering, of basic social graces. Some of us do not. And then some of us understand social graces perfectly well and choose to do the opposite. Congratuations, Alice the Sociopath!
@Hibbleton: Blondie: That evening pastry chef Maya imagines what a sandwich based marriage would look like and does some research on the net. Comes across strips by Xunise of Six Chix. “Oh, hell no!”
Size matters.
@White Rabbit: As someone who just recently had cataract surgery (and loves the results!), this hits a bit close to home. Is the secret to appreciating Pluggers the acceptance of our ever-closer mortality, and if so, can I use it in my hospice practice? (Yes and yes.)
Alice: Bottom caption written by Resident Evil’s very own Chris Redfield
Between Friends: The joke here apparently is it being a little “slice of life” that we can all relate to – except, it’s the most boring slice of life the author could come up with. This comic strip morphed into Rex Morgan MD so gradually we failed to notice.
BTW I refuse to read the title of this feature in any other sense than like being “Between Jobs”, i.e. not having one currently.
MW: “Wipe those tears, Dawn. How many times do I have to TELL you this? It makes you look like a #$%^&@ baby.”
FC: Nice how Jeffy has managed to cut off the legs of Dolly’s Thel Keane Barbie doll and glued it to his head.
DtM: Since when have mail carriers been dressing like old time train conductors? Reminds me of all those TV gas stations ads I used to see as a kid where the pump jockeys were always nattily dressed in spotless uniforms while in real life they were teenaged slobs covered head to toe in greasy, black filth.
Some months ago, “Blondie” added this black, female, young character to introduce diversity in an incredibly old IP. The character is bland and uninteresting, will never pass for a real person and she’s only used to repeat the same one-note jokes. You see? You can introduce diverse characters and have them perfectly integrated with the rest of the strip and its characters, without her sticking out! Diversity does not mean betraying the essence of the IP!
BF: Ahahaha, it’s funny because we have attachment not just to material things, but also impermanent beings like relatives and our memory of them, so overcoming materialism is not enough to reach enlightenment and the dissolution of self!
“The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach” is also a good suggestions for proctologists forced to do emergency cardiac surgery
Non-Sequitor: Wiley has been spending some valuable time on the golf course.
BETTY:. Flossing. I think it’s a parental thing– did they make us floss as kids? Though mine didn’t, I floss now due to threatening dentist.
DOONESBURY:. Is this strip a repeat or a current one? How sad we never eliminated old challenges so our grandkids have to again deal.
FRAZZ:. Hey, they’re an improvement over styrofoam.
GA:. Hilarious that this is now my most engaging strip. My city is currently being sued for insisting giant skeletons be removed.
LOLA:. It’s just a custom, Lola. To be a commandment you’d need to reverse spelling of originator.
RMMD:. only obnoxiousness comes in green packages.
S4TH:. Influenced no doubt by VD displays in Dollar stores in December, I too decorated my apt door in mid January for VD. I am more embarrassed to take it down than annoyed to keep it up.
I read “Blondie”‘s strips before the marriage, but I don’t recall being a big eater being a part of Dagwood’s characterisation, I think it became a part after the strip became about suburban life. “Blondie” is engaging in a superhero comics style retcon, trying to make everything connected! Soon it will turn out that Dithers paid for Blondie’s weeding party and this is why Dagwood is indebted with him or that Elmo’s parents conceived him at Blondie’s wedding, explaining why he spends time with Dagwood
@Ettorre:
I read Blondie daily in my newspaper (yep, it’s a real thing) but until your post, I had no idea that Maya was supposed to be black. Are you sure? And why does she only appear on Wednesdays?
So are the twins going to create a punchy headline for this gripping interview once it gets published?
“Conceited Creator Deep Dishes on Over-Baked Comicstrip with Crusty Editor. Loads of Extra Extra! Cheese”
@Anonymous: I’m with you. Doesn’t look like any black character in comics. Just say’n.
@Activist: All of the daily Doonesbury are repeats. Trudeau only does new Sunday strips.
Sometimes, they (the daily strips) are a spot-on coincidence with modern times.
Other times, they are face-palming dated.
I wish they would stop making them available so that new artists have a chance.
I’ve seen some papers replaced Candorville with old Doonesburys (“eh, one political strip is the same as another” — see DailyCartoonist.com for a look at minority-written strips).
I prefer my local paper’s adoption of “Dumplings”. I hope it succeeds.
I thought the new Blondie pastry chef is from India.
Blondie: You know how, when your friends have heard all your jokes and all your old stories, you eventually have to dump them and get new friends so you can tell your jokes and stories? No? It’s just me? Well anyway, this is today’s strip.
@Daisy: I hate to be crude, but maybe this is “root” as a verb, in the Australian sense. So both characters are just frankly acknowledging the source of “performance issues” in their relationship. It’s not that Junior Senior finds Alice unattractive (somehow); maybe he just needs to make a walkabout to the chemist-aroonie.
@Hibbleton: MW: Mary solves Dawn’s sloppy eating problem by switching her to M&Ms.
Dawn, the sloppy eater, discovers to her chagrin that they DO melt in HER hand.
ALICE: Apologies if this has been asked before, which seems likely. Does Alice have a closet full of identical dresses or does she wear the same beloved dress every single waking moment of her life, fearing the dreadful day when it finally falls apart? Also, what is that collar made out of, marshmallows?
@Liam: BLONDIE: It’s also gotta be pretty unsettling to be married to a woman whose facial expression never ever changes. He uses food to avoid thinking about the fact that he married a department store mannequin.
BLONDIE: I’d really like to know what Irma is doing these days, and also what she looks like.
@Hibbleton: That switch may bring its own problems. Don’t ask me how I know.
Dagwood seems to do nothing but eat and sleep, especially at work, and yet he’s still rail thin. His diet isn’t especially good either. Perhaps Mr Dithers should initiate a drug check on Dagwood, I think he might be addicted to horrible illegal stimulants, like cocaine or meth, but he’s become adept at timing his comedown crashes when he would have to be doing something he doesn’t want to anyway.
Found a reprint of the first Blondie strip on line (in the NYT of all places). Dagwood with slicked down hair introduces his fiancé, Blondie, to his wealthy father and she immediately starts hitting on him.
Blondie Boopadoop was a working-class party girl and Dagwood was a rich playboy. Dagwood was briefly written out by Chic Young, but readers wanted him back. Dagwood returned and married Blondie in 1933, but his parents did not approve of his bride and disinherited him, which paved the way for the more modest life the Bumsteads live. —George Gene Gustines, NY Times
I cannot help but feel, that when Alice’s boyfriend made his wish to Zoltar, he REALLY blew his phrasing.
@Cleveland Mocks: FC: “Granddad”??? Who calls their Grampa Grandad?
Um, me? Granny and Granddad. Not now of course, but 60 year ag- … oh, I see what you’re getting at.
@Ukulele Ike: RE Old Blondie: Irma’s a fool of a Took?
Wow, a rare Alice with an actual joke in it.
@Poteet:
@Hibbleton: That switch may bring its own problems. Don’t ask me how I know.
Yoiks!
Mother Goose and Grimm: I think they misspelled the word cauldron. Also it’s cool that he and his ex-wife still have a civil relationship and exchange gifts. I’m not sure where the joke is.
Family Circus: I appreciate the way 3-year old Jeffy is insulting his mother’s taste in home decor in the most passive aggressive way possible.
@Foobar: #89
Good heavens (clutching my pearls) – I am so glad you enlightened me before I take my first trip to Oz to study their horticultural practices! =:0
CS: So you agreed that cultural misappropriation for the title was the better way to go. As understandable as missing the point of kids wanting to be away from adults.
@Daisy: #104
I can see myself walking up to a guy and saying “G’day, mate! Want to go rooting with me? I’m right eager t’ learn how you boys do it Down Under!”
@UncleJeff: #86
I agree that “Doonesbury” is tiresome at this point, at least for me. I *adore* “Dumplings” – they are the sweetest little characters and they often come up with pointed commentary on current events.
@Ettorre: #79
Ha ha! I remember a friend joking with me before I had to have my gallbladder removed via laparoscopy; she said that’s where they grab your gallbladder and pull it out thru your nose. I wish I’d remembered to tell that to the surgeon!
@TheDiva: LUANN: A solo shopping trip in Tokyo sounds like the most interesting thing to happen to a Luann character in years.
As I’ve said before, when there’s multiple storytelling options available you can count on the Evanses to focus on the least exciting one. Instead of Tiffany in Japan we saw Luann flirt with a guy when we know she’ll never seal the deal with, see her harangue her family about a blood drive we know she’ll never follow up on, and see Piro take advantage of Bernice when he fully admitted to her face that he’s just gonna disappear again afterward.
@ectojazzmage:
Her name is Maya, added last year.
According to the preview in the New York Times, she is of Indian descent.
@UncleJeff: @UncleJeff:
#86. Thanks for citing that, I’ll keep checking Daily Cartoonist for more insights.
@Stacker: The title “Rappin Around” is pretty far from “Counter Culture Chronicle”. It might have been interesting to hear all the steps on that journey, a la Eddie Izzard’s Englebert Humperdink bit. Especially since Tom Batiuk loves to complain about the title of “Funky Winkerbean” when he wanted “3 O’Clock High” instead.
Also, it would have been nice to hear what yesterday’s ‘words buzzing in the air’ actually were. But “Batton” would much rather talk about the comic book job he didn’t get than the cartooning job he did.
Crank: “Interesting. So, when did you stop putting that effort in? Second strip, was it?”
JP: “I’m talking about the latest thing Ces has pulled from his ass and has suddenly always been the case, of course! Honestly, Randy, do you even pay attention to how things work in your own strip?”
“Not if I can help it, it’s easier that way!”
RMMD: Ah, the curse of a print medium; no way to tell if we’re meant to read this line as friendly banter or mocking sarcasm until we get further info. But Mary Worth‘s already botching a negging story, we don’t need Beatty to botch one as well.
Zits: Sigh. I had to go to the Comics Kingdom main site and then click on the strip to find out if this was an artistic but joke-free portrayal of how repetitive Jeremy’s days are, or if the Comic Kingdom panel-o-meter had gone peculiar again. (It was the second one.)
@DAS: All of the examples of curmudgeons are men. I object! I know I’m not the only woman who can be just as grumpy and complaining as any man.
This is a disservice to all of the ladies who comment here. We’re Curmudgeons, too!
Gassed Up Alleycats: ………and female Frank Nelson will answer..”Eeeeeee…yesssss!”
Alice: I have no problem with believing that it’s him, whoever he is, the bowtie guy. I’d also buy it being her. But Alice, bless her, is quick to dispel any ambiguity.
Blondie: Since Blondie is recalling their wedding with the happy couple already in middle age rather than the Jazz Age youths of the early comics, I call unreliable narrator.
@Majicou: Ask not for whom the bell tolkiens, it tolkiens for thee.
I was using “pippin” in the archaic slang sense of a “peach.” A “lulu.”
If you read a post of mine and think I’m making a Tolkien reference, you are almost certainly incorrect. As far as the fantasy genre goes, I’m more of a Mervyn Peake or an Arthur Machen kinda guy.
@I speak Jive:
#114. Plus Daisy, Poteet, and Activist (though I’m in a Curmudgeon abstinence program. Gratitude does seem to be an antidote.)
Our long national nightmare has started up again. ‘Funky Winkerbean’ is now on GoComics. Fortunately it’s not new stories.
@Activist: I didn’t want to miss anyone.
@Liam: I remember when Funky Winkerbean first appeared. I thought it was funny and enjoyed it. That was before it moved a quarter inch from reality.
@Hibbleton:
Indeed, they got married in the strip. It would have been great for them to grab Dagwood and Blondie from that strip for the thought bubble instead of drawing them in their modern way.
@Daisy: Good heavens (clutching my pearls) – I am so glad you enlightened me before I take my first trip to Oz to study their horticultural practices! =:0
You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think.
I’m troubled by the storyline in Mary Worth about the abusive boyfriend. He’s only known Dawn a month. He should still be in the love-bombing stage.
C-Shaft: That’s Batiuk for you. Another day, another poor reason to bend your neck sideways.
GT: I know Britney was always considered teen pop but that was at the turn of the millennium. It’s more than a little unseemly for her to be wrestling high school girls now. Does her manager think this would be really good publicity or is it a…Oh, Britney Sears. Never mind. [/Litella]
JP: Hey, turns out they have a live guard on duty and not a wax figure.
Luann: Tiffany is one of the strip’s more tolerable characters when she’s not trying to milk sympathy. Hint-hint, Evansii.
MW: Dawn will have to get back to Mary after she texts Dirk to ask him whether it’s acceptable for her to eat baked goods.
Phantom: Call me a worrywart but I think the crow’s nest should be made out of something sturdier than a giant cupcake wrapper.
Pluggers: Pluggers will send a pair of binoculars to do a magnifying glass’s job? And are insane?
RMMD: Oh, it looks like love is in the air after all. Largely because Summer has just found someone she knows right off the bat won’t outshine her by being funnier than her.
@I speak Jive: Me too!
@Anonymous: I’m troubled by the storyline in Mary Worth about the abusive boyfriend. He’s only known Dawn a month. He should still be in the love-bombing stage.
She blew him on the first date, gave up anal the next time. That moved the timeline up considerably.
@Die Rosenkavalieren:
Yay! And they used to say all comic commentators were guys! Discussion boards have really improved with contributions from women.
@Lauralot: #8: It was probably Mayor Sanderson’s drone camera, the same one that faked the footage of Abbey setting fire to the B&B.
@Bryan: Well, let’s be honest, would we really have wanted to see the Evansii present ‘The BitchSlutWhore who rejected me in high school goes to Japan’? Remember ‘Sun’?
@I speak Jive: In The Portable Curmudgeon, a compendium of quotations edited by Jon Winokur, the distaff side is represented primarily by Dorothy Parker and Fran Lebowitz. (And there are a lot of quotations that use old-fashioned expressions like “the distaff side.”)
@Guillermo el chiclero: Re DtM: Yeah, I can’t remember the last time I saw a postal delivery person wearing that hat.
RMMD: I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to go to a bar and drink soda pop to pick up a man but I guess it’s better than a bowling alley. Right, Dawn?
@Horace Broon: Re Zits: Oh, it was a mistake! That’s disappointing. I thought it was an homage to the daily diary that appeared in one of Matt Groening’s Life In Hell strips:
Mon: Got up. Ate breakfast. Went to work. Came home. Ate dinner. Watched TV. Went to bed.
Tue: Got up. Ate breakfast. Went to work. Came home. Ate dinner. Watched TV. Went to bed.
Wed: Got up. Ate breakfast. Went to work. Came home. Ate dinner. Watched TV. Went to bed.
Thu: Got up. Ate breakfast. Went to work. Came home. Ate dinner. Watched TV. Went to bed.
Fri: Got up. Ate breakfast. Went to work. Came home. Ate dinner. Went out. Got drunk.
Sat: Don’t remember.
Sun: Don’t remember.
Mon: Got up. Ate breakfast. Went to work. Came home. Ate dinner. Watched TV. Went to bed.
…
@Maude R. Fawker: #122
Aarghh! Clutching my pearls *and* collapsing on the fainting couch…
@I speak Jive: #114
You go, girl!