Water sports
Post Content
Marvin, 8/9/25
Sincere thanks to the editors who demanded that Marvin‘s creative team add the garden hose, change the punchline, and recolor the runoff.
Blondie, 8/9/25
Like me, Dagwood is of a generation for whom drinking out of the backyard hose brings back cherished summer memories of refreshment, petty transgression, and freedom. If Elmo’s lemonade was tapped from such a wellspring of fond nostalgia, Dagwood will savor it all the more. Nevertheless, he’ll make damn sure it came from Elmo’s own backyard, not that pissy toddler’s up the block.
Mother Goose and Grimm, 8/9/25
And anyway, it could be a lot worse.
9 Chickweed Lane, 8/9/25
Way back in 2016, I outlined the problem faced by 9 Chickweed Lane after the 2008 consummation of Amos’s and Edda’s courtship, which resolved the sexual tension that had long been the foundation of the strip. The solution, then as now, was to create Amos and Edda surrogates and run the whole will-they-or-won’t-they routine (spoiler alert: they will) over and over again.
But after nine years of barely disguised reruns, the narrative present has become overrun with Amos and Edda surrogates whispering coy innuendos, sublimating their lust into musical performance, and humping all over the damn place. What to do?
Apparently this: slip the bounds of time and plant those recaps in the past and future. Hence today’s legacy Edda demanding attention from prepubescent Amos, the pair’s future children, teenage twins Lolly and Polly, tormenting their own thralls, and an assortment of past, present, and future walk-on foils being sexually one-upped by the regulars. One constant is that they all seem to migrate to this lake here, which by now has got to be more grotty than Marvin’s pool.
Hi there, faithful reader! I’m sitting in for Josh through Sunday the 17th, with a sampling of comics even Josh won’t touch, as well as the old soapers I know you crave. If you run into any issues with the site, subscriber emails, or Patreon posts, please contact me at uncle.lumpy@comcast.net and I’ll do what I can to help. Enjoy!
—Uncle Lumpy
21 replies to “Water sports”
Blondie: Dagwood is Generation X?
Blondie, the Neighborhood Bumstead: “First of all, Elmo, this is NOT a ‘glass’, it is a ‘Red Solo Cup™’!” “Yea, whatever,Mr. B, how about crossing my palm with a dime?”
Mother Goose and Grimm:
Today’s dialogue is absolutely ribbiting.
Blondie:
To cover costs and allow for a reasonable profit these days, the average price for a glass of lemonade is between $0.25 and $1.00. At 10 cents a glass, either this is a throwback cartoon, or Elmo’s fledgling enterprise will soon be thrown into Chapter 11.
Marvin: Once again, we have to wonder exactly how old a baby/toddler Marvin is supposed to be. Young enough that he could drown in a kiddie pool as his negligent father snoozes three feet away? If so, I suppose that eternal question — “Do people still have gross bodily functions in heaven?” — will finally be answered by the funny pages.
Blondie: Even with hose water and generic lemon Kool-Aid mix sold from a wooden crate, there’s no way Elmo is making a profit at 10 cents a glass. This must be some kind of school art project, with an old-timey suburban activity that’s meant to demonstrate changing political and economic trends, plus a commentary on tariffs or something. I think the teacher will give him an A, if only for the special effect in which part of the sidewalk turns into grass for a few seconds.
Mother Goose and Grimm: If another animal kisses a magic frog, does the frog change into a royal version of that animal? Because if he turns into a human prince, they’ve still got a pretty big problem.
Pluggers: Does the artist even remember how big videotapes used to be, and how little programming each one could hold? “All 20 seasons of ‘Gunsmoke’ ” would barely fit in this guy’s living room.
Blondie-“And by hose I mean my…”
Beetle Bailey-It’s called a reuben.
FC-“I’m going to have a word with their manager.”
MW-“It’s not every day that I get to spend time with one of my favorite friends.” Then who is everyone else you associate with at Charterstone? Hanger ons and sycophants?
RMMD-“Come in. Come in and know me better, man.”
Blondie-“Mr. B, has your boss ever beaten you with a rubber hose?”
Slylick Fox and Comix For Kinx: “The Three Toed Toad” was a beloved Tom Lehrer song if I’m not mistaken, so congrats on the accidental (?) timeliness of today’s comic, Mr Weber.
RMMD:
“Cody?”
“Lorna? — may I use your restroom?”
Blondie vs Marvin : TWO instances of urine being replaced with “hose water” in a row! Uncle Lumpy, you spoil us
(in a manner resembling how Baja’s late-nite cuisine is spoiled)************
Frazz :
a) More like the Pithy-agorean theorem, amirite?
b) What the heck do you mean, “suspiciously convenient”? Are you losing your mind over a mathematical principle making logical sense and actually working!?
MW: “By the way, Olive, since we’re such good friends and kindred spirits, do you mind paying for our dinner?”
Marvin: Jeff may have forgotten to turn off the hose, but he always turns off the hos.
Marvin’s dad didn’t forget to turn off the hose. He’s just diluting the inevitable.
9CL: Is there a reason why Brooke isn’t on a watchlist by now?
Blondie: Only Dagwood would be dumb enough to not only drink prepubescent piss and lemon juice but pay for it.
Marvin: Jeff’s latest attempt at killing his toddler is wasted by both his use of a kiddy pool and his own addiction to Vicodin.
RMMD:
“Lorna? — how’s Liza?”
“Wrong Lorna.”
MW: Olive has quickly learned that the price of a meal with Mary Worth is obsequious ass-kissing.
RMMD: Lorna’s attitude makes me think that this is not the first time she’s welcomed one of Daddy’s by-blows.
@Needless Exposition: 9CL: Is there a reason why Brooke isn’t on a watchlist by now?
The last thing this strip needs is more readers.
MW: Olive as a pathetically lonely teen who is desperately reaching out to Mary as a friend in an increasingly hostile world is a pretty good story. That it took a month to get here (and forget the esp nonsense) is another matter.
MW: Of course one of Mary’s “favorite friends” is the fourteen year old daughter of a doctor. Mary’s “friends” are all people who are in some position of influence who are able to give her things that she wants from restaurant trips and boat rides to advice columns where she can play God. Every single relationship Mary has with people is transactional and if they’re not useful enough, they get shoved in the closet deeper than Dr. Jeff’s sexuality.
More’n likely one of Marvin’s editors reminded Armstrong that, much like ice cubes melting in a glass, any liquids carried by Marvin into the pool wouldn’t add to the total volume when expelled from his bladder and intestines.
RMMD: Cody, welcome! Have you ever considered a career you can run out of the trunk of your car in your spare time? Welcome to our family and the world of MLM.
GT: Sure, that makes sense – asking GT his thoughts as if she were asking his permission.
MW: Okay, Olivia has now mentioned the near drowning event at least twice during this outing. Maybe she actually never survived the drowning but during the final seconds of her existence she projected an existence thereby squeezing years into a few moments.
DT: Putting on our coats! Is the last person putting on a resistant vest as well?
JP: OK – now please let this be the real twist. There are NOT one, NOT two, but THREE unrelated plot threads. Thread 1 – April, ex spy/agent, gets lured to Norway by an old enema, which coincidently puts her in the same town as the girls who coincidentaly got placed in some charity non-profit job there in a rental place that is part of Thread 2 – a woman has taken over the rental property and removed the owner, and plans to dupe unsuspecting naive stupid foreign visitors – she thought she hit the jackpot with the dim and dimmer girls but Aksel as part of Thread 3 is going to further complicate matters. Aksel is a neer do well who taking advantage of the kerffufle in the coffee bar tags along with the girls hoping to figure out which one of them he should scam and con only to realize that he may have stepped into the beginning of some horror film or nordic noir novel.
RMMD: Holy shit, she’s married to Avery Brooks, aka Hawk from ‘Spenser for Hire’! Solid!
JP: Watch out, Sophie n’ Reena! Leah’s a master of one-handed strangulation! She’ll choke you both out simultaneously!
SF: ‘We had a tedious side story while you and Dad went through your own tedious main story, why?’
‘No reason, I’m just trying to distract you from the fact that your father’s pathetic friend Kevin ‘Wilbur’ Whatshisface took all the leftover pizza, because he’s broke, pathetic and starving, just in case Ces hadn’t beat that particular plot point into the ground yet.’