Fishy business
Post Content
Hagar the Horrible, 2/6/25
I think the joke here is supposed to be “Lucky Eddie, who is notoriously soft and weak, is a cat guy,” and as a cat guy I’m not going to take the bait. I am going to point out that, as depicted in the strip, Lucky Eddie is much less a cat guy (are there really any running jokes about him liking cats?) as a fish guy, or more precisely a fish–lady guy. Which leads me to ask: what’s his mermaid girlfriend’s bathroom situation like? In the strip where they’re hanging out together and she’s floating in a fish tank, is the fish tank the equivalent of her litter box? Much to think about, if you like thinking about mermaids peeing and pooping, and I apologize because you probably don’t actually like thinking about that and it may be that I did get mad about the cat thing and took the bait a little bit.
Blondie, 2/6/25
Do you like those odds, Elmo? Because I don’t, actually. I mean, I think the set of pizza ingredient combos that anyone would want to eat are relatively limited and covered by the standard menus at most pizza places, and we don’t need to go that far beyond the limits. If you want to explore the possibilities of “infinite kinds” of pizza and call up some hapless restaurant and say “Yeah, gimmie a pizza with [spins wheel] bakelite crust, tomato sauce, and [spins wheel again] deuterium” be my guest, but I don’t think you’ll enjoy the results.
Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/6/25
Yeah, what is the deal? What the heck is the deal with Rex Morgan, exactly, or just, like, the deal in general? I for one would like to know! Like, really, earnestly, please explain the deal to me. Glad to see we’re getting to the bottom of what the deal is, finally.
82 replies to “Fishy business”
RMMD:
“Why wasn’t my dating service setting me up with someone like you?”
“Well, maybe it’s the four felony convictions. Let me explain….”
RMMD:
The bartender hates Augie, because he’s occupying bar space but he’s too cheap to buy a drink.
BLONDIE: I don’t really get Elmo’s comment. The odds of what? The odds of what happening? The odds of what being true? Dagwood never mentioned any odds.
Maybe Elmo meant “the odds that we’ll never run out of new kinds of pizza to try”, but that doesn’t work in this context, grammatically.
It’s basically Dagwood saying “Pizza can be made in many ways” and Elmo replying “I like those odds!” It’s as if the cartoonist made the third panel after mostly forgetting what the dialogue was in the first two.
RMMD-“I order the most expensive thing on the menu and you leave me holding the bill.”
MW-Did Mary tell Dawn these are just endearing quirks of Dirk?
Blondie:
“Mr. B., why is it you have hair constantly sticking out of both sides of your head, and you have eyes like a Keane painting?”
“That’s a good question, Elmo. Now here’s one for you: why is it your first name is ‘Elmo’? — there isn’t a person on earth within sixty years of your age who has that first name!”
RMMD. That goatee… that proto-mullet. Good lord, she dumped a “roots country” musician! “What’s the deal, lady,” indeed!
Curtis: Okay, vacuous rich girl who can buy an insult but can’t accept one who’s glued to her technology…. if she was a teenage cheerleader, we could tell the projection, my advice is to move on, Ray.
RMMD:
“Hey, lady! What in the heck is The Deal?”
“It’s a 2023 made-for-TV K-drama thriller, featuring the character Lee Jun Seong, masterfully portrayed by Yoo Seung Ho. Why do you ask?”
Blondie The Vulcans call it ITIP: Infinite Toppings on Infinite Pizzas
MT: Chekov’s Redbearded Brother conspicuously absent from the scene. I’d say he uses his Beard O’ Justice before Mark gets there.
HtH: Nice touch in shifting the background color from beige to sickly green as this band of vicious warriors get nauseous thinking about cat turds.
Blondie: No better setting to discuss infinite pizza than in a blue void outside of physical reality. Do you think they managed to get that pizza delivered there, or did Dagwood manifest it with his Dr Manhattan-like powers?
RMMD: “What the heck is the deal”? It’s like if Jerry Seinfeld and Ned Flanders had a very 90s baby…
On a meta note, today’s BLONDIE scenario demonstrates just how long the strip has been running. Elmo’s just sitting there, having pizza with Dagwood. There’s no reason why Dagwood would invite Elmo to dinner, and in the earlier days of the strip, I don’t recall him ever casually sharing a meal with the Bumsteads. In theory, the scene makes no sense.
But since Elmo’s been coming and going, uninvited, from the Bumstead home for decades in real-world time, there’s nothing weird or humorous about him being there anymore. It’s just what Elmo does, and for all intents and purposes he serves the purpose of the child of the family, even though he’s not. (The other two kids are too old for kid jokes to work with them.) Thus, the cartoonists don’t really feel the need to justify Elmo’s having dinner with Dagwood. Elmo is, for all intents and purposes, the youngest Bumstead family member, and therefore there’s no reason why he shouldn’t sit there, happily munching pizza with his non-Dad.
Hagar: In the late 1800s, people sometimes kept a dirt-filled pan for kitty waste. “Cat litter” made of wood ash was developed in the 1930s. The Kitty Litter brand, which substituted clay, was invented in 1947. The point being, none of these products were used during the Viking era, when — as throughout most of the history of cat domestication — cats would be expected to do their business outside. So Eddie here is a freak, but could he also be a pioneer? (Nah, he’s basically just a freak.)
Blondie: Does it really matter how many kinds of pizza there are, Elmo? In the end, it all goes to the same place — your strange adult friend’s incinerator of a belly.
Rex Morgan: “What’s the deal with women?” says this dude in a voice that sounds like Jerry’s, even though he looks more like Kramer. “Can’t live with ’em, can’t keep ’em from bonding with their kid’s old English teacher!”
Pluggers: You’re a plugger if it’s 2025, and you think “jeans with holes” are the latest kooky fashion trend.
MW: Place your bets. Is Jared finally going to intervene or just think really hard about how he doesn’t like this guy?
Blondie: As Dagwood brings the slice to his mouth a big glob of pizza sauce and cheese falls on his shoe. As he’s about to take a bite out of said shoe he says to Elmo; “I did say ‘infinite'”.
There was an episode of the show Millionaire Matchmaker in which the MM had a male client and a female client at the same time. After the usual parade of bimbos and hunks, she asked them to pick their dates. The clients, who had been talking during breaks, decided to date each other.
“I’m not signed up with a dating service! I find my casual hookups on Tinder like a normal person! What are you, eighty?”
(I have a lot of gall to be busting on Rex Morgan for that when it took me three tries to figure out the name of the hookup app for straight people, and that’s not counting when my brain said “Tumblr.” Pluggers idea! “Plugger Tinder” and Andy Bear is chopping firewood. Is there a chance they haven’t already done that?)
Blondie : Dagwood has a pretty wide definition of what qualifies as a pizza, but I bet to you he’s one of those people who fly into a rage if you say “a taco is a sandwich” or “milk is a sauce, ergo a bowl of cereal is a salad”.
**********
Frazz : it’s the third thing, Caufield. And in ALL circumstances, not just the hypothetical you described.
**********
Luann : …and there it is, absolutely nothing can ever happen to change the status quo.
**********
Rex Morgan M.D. : I’m betting two things : this guy was supposed to be Summer’s blind date, and that he and Augie Shuster know each other (and are close friends; by their appearances, I’m assuming he’s the Maynard G. Krebs to his Dobbie Gillis).
MW – Wasn’t Jarod’s girlfriend a victim of domestic abuse? I would think seeing Dirk yell at Dawn could be triggering some PTSD.
@Anonymous: wait you put sauce on salads?
RMMD: this is definitely the guy Summer walked out on on Monday. I was confused because he didn’t look like the Vintage Car Blatherer from 1/22 (see Josh’s post, I’m out of links), but this is a totally different date. The strip told us that Summer was walking out on her overbearing date without showing him being overbearing. And why did I expect anything different from this strip? Why?
I like those options, opportunities, choices. Odds? No.
@rjeffryes@gmail.com: It was heavily, heavily implied when Jess initially appeared that she was a victim of domestic violence. Her first line of dialogue was “…and then he started hitting me” and she later mentioned filing a restraining order and moving out.
However, Moy must have realized how creepy it was to have Jared dating his abuse victim patient, because by the time Jess told Jared the Official Story of what happened, she was walking alone at night and got beat up by some random mugger.
@Anonymous: I too knew Stef was going to come in at a pivotal moment (though I figured she was going to catch Tiffany and Kip in an embrace), but we’ve got tomorrow and Saturday before we cut to our next ‘new adventure!’, so there’s still time for the strip to either pull a Quill or indeed reset everything back to the status quo. Stef and Kip will always be together, Tiff has always been chubby, and TJ will fume at Tiffany for not doing her job but never actually work up the nerve to fire her.
@Mikey: Cousin Oliver et al
Pluggers: Wait, don’t Pluggers belong to that generation that darns holes in garments? Or has it too become a lost art like writing cursive or reading an analog watch.
RMMD: I’d say this was setting up a confrontation where Augie Doggie white knights Summer by decking Cosmo Kramer here, but then I remembered what strip we’re talking about.
“Except Pineapple, Mr B?”
“Except Pineapple, Elmo.”
Hagar the Horrible: I just spent 5 minutes picturing Lucky Eddie’s injuries caused by the cat that he has spent half his life cleaning up after.
MW: Can someone with editing skills put a mustache on Dirk and change the dialogue to yelling about pictures of Spider-Man?
Pearls before Swine was great today.
HtH – And that was the rewarding part….
Blondie – Dag is the Carl Sagan of pizza….
RMMD – Do I look like one of those losers who’d use a dating service…um…like you….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
M Worth – When Dawn was praying to end her loneliness, she must have slurred her words because she ended up with a big, angry Dirk.
Blondie: The Most Dangerous Sport: Pizza. No, it doesn’t quite work, does it? Ethiopian camel burgers topped with berbere sauce, yes. Lou’s three-alarm chili, maybe. But pizza toppings? You might as well be gambling your life with mayonnaise and creamed corn, which [checks notes, discovers both are served on Japanese pizza]…uh, you know what? Never mind, kid. I like those odds too, outside of Hokkaido.
HTH: I’ll bet you anything Hagar is thinking, “How long do I have to stand here, looking concerned, before I can leave?”
Blondie: So … Dagwood and Elmo are enjoying pizza in heaven?
RMMD: I haven’t been following Rex Morgan lately, so I’ll just assume the blonde with the ponytail walked out in the middle of a painting lesson, and now her teacher has tracked her down to a bar.
Rex Morgan, MILF Diver – So Summer walks out on a self-absorbed jerk and, rather than leave the premises, saunters to the nearby bar, making it easy for the aforementioned jerk to find her and ask, “What’s the deal?” It’s still the most action we’ve seen in this strip in years. Bravo, Beatty.
Hagär the Horrible: Hagar, the other men, Lucky Eddie’s bed — all these appear to me literally two-dimensional, mere cardboard cutouts, scenery for Eddie to chew while he expounds his rage and existential disappointment. But the hair on Eddie’s legs? Now that, that brings a much-needed touch of realism to the situation. Thanks, Eddie’s leg hair! You really make the stakes visible today!
DtM: The teacher observes Dennis’ well done (for his age) painting and wonders why God gives his gifts to those least deserving.
MW; please make this stop. We’ve known from the beginning that Dirk is a piece of shit asshole. What’s left to prove? And what does Dirk see in Dawn?
From the shades of the underworld, one shadowy figure will occasionally emerge to lament his fate in the most anodyne way possible. He cries out not to an unhearing god, but the middle-aged blonde who walked out on him. Yes, the math works out here, much mythology, very Greek, well done, Rex Morgan M.D., we’re only missing Orpheus and his roots country harp!
@Professor Well Actually: He sees someone willing to put up with his abuse.
Rex Morgan, M.D.: Sometimes you don’t know you want something until you get it and I’m all in for this Jerry Seinfeld/Jerry Lewis/Maynard Krebs mix showing up at a bar where no one knows your name and everyone wears Members Only jackets.
While he wouldn’t kill anyone himself, I’m getting the feeling Dagwood wouldn’t be averse to trying cannibalism just once. He would definitely be the first to bring it up after surviving a shipwreck, plane crash, or fender bender.
I’ve got nothing today. No quips, no jokes, no rambles.
MW: Haven’t checked in on this strip for a while. So, we’re back at BOWL, eh? And Dirk is still being abusive, whilst Jared and Jess look on? Did I get that right? Okay, then. See you in another week or so.
@Hibbleton: I protest about reading an analog watch as an obsolete skill. Watches themselves are pretty archaic but analog clocks are all over.
Cursive writing is pretty dead though and good riddance, say I.
@matt w: I’m a fan of cursive. Less strain on the wrist than printing and it’s faster when taking notes. It also apparently helps with fine motor control, and I need all the help I can get.
@matt w:
Go back one more day (Sunday) before the strip you linked to, and yeah he was shown as completely overbearing.
MW: Dawn stops by Mary’s on the way to the plastic surgeon. “Dirk says I need this, Mary, and I’m this close to making our romance work [holds up pinched thumb and index finger].”
A loud, continuous horn is heard coming from outside along with Dirk screaming out the car window. “HURRY UP, Flatty!!!”
Zits Spanish to English.
RMMD:
“Exactly what kind of music does your nephew play, anyway, ‘Augie’?”
“Oh, you know — light, fun, frothy fare. Sepultura. All That Remains. White Zombie. That kind of stuff.”
HtH: Find the 6 differences: All 4 faces, 1st viking’s shield, Lucky Eddie’s oil-can hat.
MW: For crying out loud, Dawn, you had DAYS to immerse yourself in intensive all-day bowling lessons before this match. And did you? No, you did not. You just frittered away that opportunity. And now Dirk’s suffering the consequences. If you’re not going to put any work into this relationship, he has every right to scream at you.
CS: Huh? If anything deserves a “What the heck is the deal?” today, it’s Crankshaft. Because I seriously don’t know what the heck the deal is.
GT: Speaking of which, what the heck is the deal with the legs in panel 3? This is one unrecognizable deal. It’s a deal without coherence. No obvious deal is evident. What the heck is going on today?
MW – Dirk must be quite the hit at the car dealership. You call that a !@#$ trade-in, LOSERBOY? Oh, you arranged your own #$%^! financing? Thanks for blowing my bonus, #$@!&*^! Now, do you want the undercoating or not, %^$#&*? Now you want a better price, CHEAPSKATE? Let me go talk to the @#$%^ manager!
@Liam:
MW-Did Mary tell Dawn these are just endearing quirks of Dirk?
PLAYOFFS!!!???
@Cleveland Mocks: In the previous two strips, Harry Dinkle was talking about how the Battle of the Bands was always held during a rainstorm. Now he’s dreaming that just before a Battle of the Bands, he got a message from God to build an ark, indicating that the rainstorm would be the worst one yet.
@The Rambling Otter: Although I have been feeling better lately, I feel like my life has a bit more balance.
@The Rambling Otter:
I’ve got nothing today. No quips, no jokes, no rambles.
So today you’re the Rambling Notter.
HtH: The two panels are so close to identical, we can play Slylock Fox: Eddie’s eye, his left arm elevation, space between his ankles, pillow stripes, Viking #1’s right arm, Viking #2’s mouth. I think that’s about it.
RMMD — With an intense effort of will, Marty Moon breaks the confines of Gil Thorp and transports himself into another strip, only to find that it’s Rex Morgan. What’s the deal indeed!
@Joshua K.:
Yeah, okay, but what the heck is the deal with that scalloped blue thing he’s holding? I can’t figure out what it’s supposed to be.
Hagar the Horrible – Lucky Eddie’s family were a bunch of cat hoarders, and it fell on him to keep the litter boxes clean, lest the untreated mental illnesses give them a reputation for uncleanliness and disrepute in the honor-based society of Vikings. A lifetime of litterboxes, as well as cleaning up the dead animals that cats dragged in, made the bloody work of being a Viking raider not only tolerable, but desirable as it at least offered a way to build status.
Blondie – “And thus it was the end of the Universe, with the hunger god Dagwood and his apprentice Elmo consuming the very last of the matter of the existence, completing their eons long challenge to eat every last pizza possible.
Dagwood let out a a large but silent burp, with no matter around for the sound to resonate.
“What now, Mr. B?” the apprentice Elmo asked.
“Dessert, of course,” Dagwood said, “There are other universes than these, including ones with an infinite number of cakes.”
Meanwhile, to the astonishment of an elderly newspaper reader in Iowa, Dagwood and Elmo crawled out from their panels and onto the kitchen table. Dagwood sniffed the air and spotted a cake donut on the elderly newspaper reader’s plate.
“What did I tell you, Elmo?” Dagwood said, “The first in a whole universe worth of cakes to consume.”
Rex Morgan, MD – Despite reports of his being a billionaire, Jerry Seinfeld poorly managed his money, supplying all the cars for Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and self-funding Unfrosted as a loss leader to start a Food Brand Origin Cinematic Universe. He’s been reduced to making cameos to pay his rent, but with the decline of broadcast comedy, he’s had to settle to showing up in newspaper comics.
MW: The bells, whistles, and red flags aren’t that the guy is so competitive that he yells at his date.
It’s that the guy is so competitive, that he cares about the score enough to have teams.
Bowling is what interrupts the pizza and beer. (“Oh, shit, it’s my turn? I’ll be back.”)
I’ll just say, lucky eddie spends a lot of time changing water in the aquarium, if you know what I mean. So it doesn’t build up too much ammonia and get too basic for the fish. If you know what I mean. I hear the fish are all about the bass, if you know what I mean.
Cleaning cat litter? Eddie, you’re a Viking. You couldn’t care less about the cat shitting on the floor, because you do the same
Yeah, gimmie a pizza with [spins wheel] bakelite crust, tomato sauce, and [spins wheel again] deuterium
You DON’T put tomato sauce on a deuterium pizza. It HAS to be alfredo!
Geez, dude probably thinks pineapple is an acceptable pizza topping too!
@Lauralot: If you thought Jared dating his patient/domestic abuse victim Jess was creepy, wait until you see Jared ignore and then dump Jess to white knight another woman from a abuser. That seems to be on the schedule for this tone-deaf, disgusting story.
Once there was Roman imperialism, which believed that the entire world should come under the domination of Italian laws and weapons. And it succeeded. At the time of the Renaissance, Italian imperialism aimed to force world literature, poetry, painting and sculpture to follow the Italian model. And it succeeded. These days, Italians are less ambitious and their food imperialism is just to turn every food into a pizza. And it succeeded!
MW – In my misspent youth, I went bowling with my friend, home from college for the summer, and his college roommate, who I had a massive crush on. I bowled a 4. Ten frames. Four pins in ten frames. My crush couldn’t have been nicer about it. I’m sad to say, the crush and I never got together due to several instances of terrible timing, but at least he wasn’t a d-bag about my horrible bowling skills.
I wonder if he ever thinks about me, when he sees a gutter?
@Cleveland Mocks: The deal is: a content syndicate has kept a once-capable cartoonist on the payroll at least 15 years too long, during which time his work turned into the most self-indulgent wankfest this side of Sonichu. In fact, that’s the deal for most of the comics page.
With a quick twist of her neck, she flashed her ponytail across the room with the crack of a whip. A deep bloody welt appeared on the rude man’s cheek. As he ran out, she turned with a smile toward her companion. “You wanna see what else it can do?” she purred.
We’re all wondering “what horrible secret is Kelly’s teacher hiding? What misfortunes will befall Kelly’s mother? This cannot simply be a conflict-less story about older people finding love in the autumn of their life!” But folks, this is “Rex Morgan MD”, so it may well be!
MW: MAN…that dude Dirk REALLY likes bowling…
@Liam: Endearing Quirks of Dirk was the name of my high school punk band
I know we all hate Jared for some reason, but can we stop accusing him of dating a domestic abuse victim? She was mugged. By a stranger. That’s not domestic abuse.
@Hibbleton:
B. Bailey: Bah, the other day I surmised that the soldiers had all been assimilated by the creature from the Thing movie when it was Invasion of the Body Snatchers all along.
@Old School Allie Cat: “I wonder if he ever thinks about me, when he sees a gutter?”
That is an INCREDIBLE joke setup that I’m just going to let go by….
@astroboy: I don’t particularly hate Jared more than I hate anyone else in this strip, but I think I can summarize why he’s so despised by readers.
He’s consistently presented in the narrative as the nice guy, but in a way that makes him come off as a Nice Guy. He’s presented as some paragon of virtue in comparison to the other men that Dawn dates, (Dirk’s absuive, Hugo’s narcissistic, Dr. Fletcher’s a cheater), but the only thing that makes him better is that he manages the bare minimum of human decency. He comes off as sulky drip (he was pissy about Dawn dating Fletcher well before he knew Fletcher was married) who has clumsiness and Star Wars in place of any real personality traits.
Not to defend Dawn, because Dawn sucks, but her stated reason for not telling Jared she was going dancing with Cathy during their breakup arc was because Jared hates dancing and would have moped about it. Which is gross if true. God forbid your partner has hobbies outside of you. He was also planning to break up with Dawn to date Jess before he even learned that Dawn had lied about her whereabouts. And at that point, Jess was still hospitalized and so still his patient.
And while we know now that Jess was a mugging victim, her introduction very very much seemed like she was a domestic violence victim, and I’m fairly sure she was intended to be one before Moy realized how much of a creep that made Jared and changed her mind.
This would be bearable if he were presented as a flawed character. As much as Moy loves Wilbur, I don’t think we were meant to believe Wilbur was justified in threatening to strangle a cat or in letting everyone think he was dead. But we are supposed to think Jared is justified in everything.
Lastly, he named his cat Mr. Solo. Not Han. Not Han Solo. Not Solo. Mr. Solo. For that alone he deserves hate.
The Cleveland newspaper (yeah, I’m a Plugger) has THREE separate sage-on-the-mountaintop comics today. It’s amazing that they can still keep coming up new punchlines for this old trope.
RMMD: After effortlessly dispensing Angry Dumped Dude, Augie suggests a round of bowling, where he’s then obligated to defend Dawn from Dirk, because nobody-the-hell-else is doing anything.
Don Abundio, translated:
“Woodman! Spare that tree!”
“I have orders to cut it down, sir”
“This is terrible!”
“Have you no respect for the love of my life?”
[On tree: ABUNDIO LOVES MONEY]
@astroboy: It was heavily implied though – https://comicskingdom.com/mary-worth/2022-06-11
But it’s not really Jared, it’s the writer getting themselves out of a corner, so I don’t hate on Jared. :-)
@Sequitur: As DT said to JDV – Where’s the god damned sofa? JDV to DT – You mean the fucking couch?