A bullet’s too good for this creep
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Blondie, 2/13/25
I like the first couple of panels here: Dagwood being somewhat indulgent about his barber’s fixation — he knows a thing or two about fixations, ha ha! — but looking concerned as he walks out, knowing that his nervously sweaty friend will be blowing that crisp $20 bill on officially licensed Team USA merch or a Peacock Premium subscription. I don’t care for the final panel, though, as it forces me to contemplate how weird Dagwood’s skull shape is.
Dick Tracy, 2/13/25
Oh yeah so it turns out that Dick’s ex-partner was in fact the real killer, and all his (stolen? I think? or maybe he was paid, to do crime?) money blew away right before Dick punched him in the face. I guess it proves that crime doesn’t pay, because your money will blow away, and that’s even before the part where you get punched in the face.
B.C., 2/13/25
Hey, remember how the ant dad in B.C. died horribly? Were you wondering how his family was doing in his absence? Well! Not good, it turns out.
72 replies to “A bullet’s too good for this creep”
B.C.:
“I’ve got it! Let’s assemble an ant farm!”
Blondie:
“Yeah, why?”
“He’s shaved a scathing critique of the French judge whose scoring helped give the gold medal to the French ice-dancing couple instead of the American one into your hair!”
Initial reaction to headline and post: “I too dislike Dagwood Bumstead.”
Dick Tracy:
“I’m going to punch you so hard that you don’t get back up — unlike in the Phantom strip, where the bad guys sometimes come to for the sake of advancing the plot line!”
Jeez, ant-mom, learn to play Fortnite with your ant-kids if you want to bond. Or go on a mating flight with some of your other husbands and let the kids pupate.
MW-Jeff then shoves Mary overboard.
MW-“Speaking of changes, Mary.”
MW-Here comes another awkward marriage proposal from Jeff.
FC-“This story is about a man and a woman and their parrots.”
Shouldn’t at least one ant kid need the TV? How…how many devices do these ants possess? Ant Widow is a paying job? There is underlying darkness here, people.
BC: I guess you could say he’s now an abs-ant father
Luann-Ox is big in every place except one.
Waaaaaaaiiiiit a minute! Dick Tracy a SOUTHPAW???? I call bullshit!
Blondie Thst barber’s work is even more impressive/terrifying when you realize that he somehow did it with a pair of scissors.
DT Poor bastard, he lost all his money to CRACK.
Luann: Luann, if Ox is such a catch, why don’t you date him?
Today’s comic could’ve just been Blondie looking at the reader and saying “Watch the Olympics!” right? That would still be funnier than this, and could inspire existential, fourth wall debates, which are always totally fun and interesting. Time for a breakfast brandy. No, your mother isn’t coming back.
GT: “What about student athletes?” he asks the man whose second most notable character trait was being attacked and traumatized by a student athlete. The most notable trait is the perm.
MW: In a long-hoped-for maneuver, Jeff has changed positions with Mary as she blathers on interminably about the Camerons and their parrots, keeping his grip on the wheel while edging her ever closer to the side of the boat. Now for just a quick jerk of the wheel to port…!
Blondie: If you look at it just right, it looks like Dagwood has five eyes, five vacant flesh-colored eyes. Must be a Friday the 13th thing.
MW – Jeff thinks Mary’s got the oven warmed up enough after her fantasy meddling that he makes the big move with a hand on her shoulder. He’s going to need that hand for himself.
@Liam: I’ve just realized: The reason Mary will never ever marry Jeff isn’t even because it would upset the status quo of the strip. No, it’s because Mary would absolutely take her husband’s last name, and then all brand recognition would be lost.
This week’s Mary Worth strips remind me of the Indiana Jones movie where Indy talks for 2 hours about his friends becoming bird owners, because that’s so goddamn exciting. Yeah, it WAS still better than Crystal Skull
Oh no, it’s terrible that father and son are spending some time together, bonding over their shared love of video games!
The colourist is a coward! That puddle is not blue!
DT: A near-perfect distillation of this strip’s zeitgeist. The only way it could be better is if Dick’s buddy’s glasses were to go flying off in Panel Two.
“My barber ruined my hair because he is obsessed with the Olympics! But it could be worse, if he were a cartoonist he would ruin a strip for thousands of readers!”
“Guess it’s solitaire again” is also what the ant wife says most nights in bed
Gosh, a cop’s old mentor or former partner whom we’ve never seen before turned out to be the villain of the story arc? Who could have seen that coming, apart from everyone who’s ever watched any cop show ever made?
BC: Want to feel old? The Call of Duty series started in 2003, and CoD 4 – the smash hit best-seller that made the franchise into a gamer behemoth – came out in 2007, nineteen years ago. There are plenty of parents out there now who grew up playing Call of Duty themselves! Pretty soon “Ugh, my wretched offspring want to play video games instead of learning the rules of contract bridge” jokes will be as anachronistic as Curtis’ “Ugh, my wretched offspring want to listen to hip-hop instead of appreciating Motown and bebop”.
The plaque reveals that the barber has an Italian surname, implying that he is not particularly excited because he is a blank character serving a stupid joke tied to the calendar, but because he appreciates the exceptional intake of medals by Italian athletes in this Olympics. Building up a background character, predicting months in advance the results of dozens of different sports: that’s the great care and ingenuity that goes in building an exceptional product like “Blondie”!
Wrecks Moregone:
How old is Jimjohnny now, 25? If he keeps aging at this rate he’ll be a retiree by the time he gets out of that bed.
@Schroduck: Judging by the space left in the word balloons, the original text may have read “Space Invaders” and “Asteroids.”
@Schroduck: The flash forward is Curtis complaining that his kids would rather listen to Emo-Rap than Wu-Tang.
Blondie-And now the writers of ‘Blondie’ shall be sued into oblivion by the Olympic Committee for their improper use of the Olympic Rings.
BC-Her OnlyFans subscribers will love seeing her play Solitaire.
I haven’t cared about the Olympics since 1992, and I have no clue why anyone else does. It’s basically pro wrestling if you banned all the heels (Soviet Union/Russia). Now mix that with college football’s jingoistic fan bases, and its phony-baloney “we’re amateurs!” act.
And I *like* sports.
MW Given his “wait for Mary to acknowledge his existence > boat cruise > Bum Boat > allude to anything further than hand-holding and be brushed off” routine, maybe Dr Jeff shouldn’t be catty about who is “set in their ways”
FC There is! This one is a fantasy story where, with no sugar or salt and the most exciting ingredient being dehydrated tofu, the contents are delicious!
@InvasionOfTheZIM: @pugfuggly: I doff my fedora to you
magnificent bastardsgentlesirs for finding these wonderful puns.The Wizard of Id: The Hart-verse seems to have discovered technology. Not good, not good at all.
Blondie: As a humble baldy, it’s been a while since I’ve gone to a barber, but I want to say $20 is a little low for anyone outside of a beauty school student. On the other hand, all Dagwood’s barber seems to do is trim Dag’s antennae back a bit and, uh, doodle on his head with Sharpies? so maybe he’s not worth $50.00 after all?
Luckily for Dagwood, he got his haircut before biathlon coverage begins. “Hey, Morelli! What’s with the rifle?”
Dick Tracy doesn’t really do catchphrases, but if he did, it would be something like “Hey, bad person! [PUNCH] Don’t. Do. Crime.” or “Forget about crime, you deceitful crimer!”
DT: Lesson – always accept cash in a Samsonite.
God damn, Dick hit him so hard that the black reflective goo in his head leaked out! I have to admit, they turned Dick Tracy into the X-Files pretty subtly, but I’m looking forward to Dick punching the Cigarette Smoking Man.
MW: Jeff has been dating Mary for years and he hasn’t been able to do so much as slip her a little tongue. Once a month he takes her on a a sunset cruise and dinner at the Bum Boat. Could it be Jeff is set in his ways?
@Professor Well Actually: Earlier this week, someone called Jeff the most pathetic character in Mary Worth. I agree with that assessment.
FC: A read downer today. Jeffy’s question reminds Thel that it’s aways the same old story.
JP: “We have only each other in this prison, Randolph, each other and time.” –One of the sweeter St. Valentine’s day comic strip hookups I’ve seen this year.
So my understanding is that humans haven’t invented anything, all of our technology comes from a cadre of archaeological entomologists making bank from what they’ve dug up from ancient ant homes.
B.C. – Wait, I’m confused. Did Mr. and Mrs. Ant have two kids or just one? If it’s the latter, then who is the other ant? Did Mrs. Ant already remarry? Did Mr. Ant come back from the dead like Jesus? Was his death scene just a dream sequence? Do I actually care about the answers?
Props to Blondie for doing something different with the art, and props to BC for being at least somewhat topical.
MW: ‘Speaking of being set in their ways, get your #$&@ing hand off my shoulder, *Jeff*…’
DT: Never thought I’d say this about a modern-day Dick Tracy story but Welp, THAT was easy!!
Luann: This is gonna be more painful than Gunther/Bets, Bernice/Piro and Luann/Phil/Quill/the Curling Iron combined…
@Banana Jr. 6000: Indeed, and that’s all before you get to all the corruption within the IOC, the reputation-washing of hideous governmental regimes, and the fact that countries repeatedly fall for the grift of the games bringing economic stimulus to the areas taken over for stadiums, playing fields, etc., only for everything to fall back into rack and ruin the second the games are over and everyone goes home.
@Lauralot: BINGO, unless, she adopts the time honored old school Hollywood method of never publicizing the marriage and pretending to the public that it doesn’t exist. Only years later to be blackmailed when someone from school management realize that there is a marriage license down at City Hall. Yeah, that fits the way these stories work about 100 years out of date!
BC – I have questions about ants: are female ants born with eyelashes or do they develop at puberty? At what point in their evolution did they lose their bipedalism? Where do they buy those tiny TVs?
BC: Gee, if only there were an adult authority figure who could tell the kids, “No, you play video games every day, this is family time, now what do you want to play, Settlers of Catan or Ticket to Ride?” Ah well.
Blondie: Welp, hope the Blondie team got express written consent from the International Olympic Committee for today’s strip, otherwise they’re gonna need to lawyer up and fast.
DT: Rather than sit with Jerry’s insinuation that a paid hitman and a state law enforcement officer have a lot in common, Dick Tracy ad hominems the argument by showing his downfall to greed. Dick isn’t like you at all, Jerry! You kill people just for money, while he’s in it for the love of the game!
MW: Mary finds a copy of The Sun Also Rises in the head. “Well, that explains a lot.”
Chix (sic): I take it ‘Potatoes’ was Patrinos’ nickname in grade school.
Gasoline Alley: Saundra is the unfortunate worker who gets to face customers and make excuses for a screwed-up system she has all the responsibility for, but no authority to fix. But GA isn’t about something so real-world.
Find a manager and get them to do an override. Can’t anyone in Centerville unleash their inner Karen?
RMMD: June is about to pull a BOGO coupon from her purse, isn’t she? Hope you’re not too fond of those tonsils, Johnny. At least Glenwood Hospital knows how to scan a damned coupon.
GT: Coach Gerands makes Bobby Knight look like Father Flanagan.
Crankshaft: When you put all these schoolkids in a panel with no adults I can only wonder why these middle-schoolers (?) have such odd proportions.
BC – I often get annoyed by BC’s inability to stick to the prehistoric conceit. But maybe this is a warning. Many thousands of years ago ant culture had developed television and video games… what caused their civilization’s downfall? How much more advanced did their technology get, and are we treading the same path? In several thousand years, will some TV-watching video game-playing evolved otter be typing this same comment about humans?
@Hibbleton:
Yeah, this Bogdon sure works fast, no?
@Hibbleton:
Duuuuuude. DEEP lit dork dive. Fist bump!
Alice: I’m still waiting for the official Alice–Mary Worth crossover, specifically, a Moy–Beizer production. I think Beizer’s inscrutable surrealism reminiscent of Joan Miró would really complement Moy’s meandering, recursive plotting.
GT: Loser creep who peaked in high school proudly declares intention to try to peak in high school again.
DT: The Mirror could have been so much better. He could have been the dark image of Tracy – someone who takes being a villain with the same square jawed seriousness as Tracy – uses tech, observant, careful but a person of action. Instead we get a bumbler who takes cash (no bank transfers here to off shore account) and bungles his own escape!
Please let the real answer be the Jerry Gould is pretending to be the Mirror .
GT: Remember folks that getting a score on a test in the bottom 5% is just as hard as getting a score in the top 5%. GT has achieved the rare triple: ugly art, weird plotting, and somehow making nearly every major character disagreeable and unlikable in some way at the same time.
JP: Is Bogdan asking Randy to be his friend and prison-buddy? Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Charlotte is overseeing the fitting out of the stalls now that the main framing is done. She asks that the hayloft have two drop doors and a couple of tackles and pulleys installed.
MW: I thought everyone was kidding when they mentioned the strip will now recap everything that has occurred the past few weeks – a classic Tell Don’t Show example. Doc Jeff in the final frame has already dosed himself and is now feeling a good buzz and can just chill out.
Phantom: KARATE CHOP!!!!. Unfortunately, after giving fair warning, Patrolperson Han chose this moment to finally fire, and inadvertently hits the mighty striped shorted one.
RMMD: Johnny is keeping score. So far he is two up on Sarah and Michael.
@Menace the Dennis: It’s best not to ask; some of the reproductive strategies used by ants are pretty disturbing and inappropriate for a comic. Though not as disturbing as the business with clownfish switching genders and the implications for Finding Nemo.
Blondie – Whoever’s in charge of popularizing internet memes and getting them to cross over into real-world usage, please get to work right away on “Go home and take a nap!”
C’shaft: Yeah, the bus driver won’t be suspicious at all when you pull out an old Nokia flip phone and say “it’s mine, honest!”
Dustin: No, sorry, either Dustdad is such a glutton that he thinks nothing about dropping $15 for Cheesecake Factory beignets (no, he’s not sharing, his wife can get her own dessert if she wants one), or he’s such a cheapskate that he’ll wait until he’s home where he can scarf an entire tub of Neapolitan by himself, but he needs to pick a lane.
GT: Coach Permawave looks more and more like the unholy love child of Michael Bolton and Tommy Wiseau every time we see him.
HotC: How long before Steenz starts getting angry letters for “promoting demonic occult activity to innocent children”?
JP: Dude, Randy tuned you out as soon as you started waxing rhapsodic on your name meaning.
MW: God, I hate the Mary Worth recap. It goes nowhere and adds nothing; it’s just two people smugly gossiping about their neighbors and feeling superior to them. I wish the SS Compensation would get mistaken for a South American drug runner by American military intelligence.
Phantom: Yeah, good thing you thought that quip rather than saying it aloud. You definitely need to workshop that one.
I just flipped through the new Dick Tracy comic book, which apparently is also doing a plot about how one of Tracy’s old friends worked with the Nazis. Hey Tracy: maybe you work with assholes, huh
Don Abundio, translated:
“Oh! Those short skirts!”
“Those knockers!”
“This is awesome!”
“Yeah!”
“My dude, do you realize that in the future we’ll be able to receive Bettie Page pinups through our telephones?”
Phantom: I still think it would’ve been better if Stripeybutt just casually tossed a banana peel in front of Chuma and watched him go flying like Charlie Brown after Lucy pulls the football.
@TheDiva: RE: MW: Isn’t this the premise of the series to begin with?
JP: It seems that to be a member of the Parker clan, you have to do time in prison at some point in your life. How long before Charlotte ends up in the big house?
Dick Tracy: The whole concept of “Tracy’s first partner on the force left and became a villain” keeps pulling me out of the story. Tracy’s career track is well-documented in the strip, and the only times he’s ever been a uniformed beat cop were when someone decided he’d gone too far and busted him down from Detective. He was a private eye who only joined the force after Tess’ father was murdered and Tess was kidnapped by the killers. Basically got handed a badge and joined as a detective (kinda like McGarrett handing out badges on the Hawaii Five-O reboot: “Thanks for the help, you’re on the team now”)–never went to the police academy, never walked a beat, didn’t have to apply for a promotion. To the best of my recollection (and I’ve read a lot, albeit not all, of the early years), Tracy’s first partner was Pat Patton.
Anyway. Tracy punch villain, villain go down.
B.C.: This miserable strip exposes the rather nasty undercurrent to a lot of “kids and their DAMN phones”-style commentary in media. Namely that the complaint really just amounts to the older person being a bitter asshole who doesn’t like it when anyone has different interests from them.
@Anonymous: Well, authoritarians back in the day had to set up governments to do their dirty deeds.
Now, they just go and see billionaires like Diet Smith.
SF: Ummm. Has unsupervised brat Bettina been reading the Epstein Files?
GT: I can remember way, way back in the day when the syndicate bragged of a high school coaching association gave an award to GT for its depiction of high school athletes and coaches.
Has anyone at that association seen GT lately?
@treetown:
In re GT: At least Coach Gerards is supposed to be a .shallow egotist, it’s the supposed “protagonists” that really get to me
@Everything Is Better With Monkeys: Given that ants developed large-scale agriculture, domesticated other animals, and learned to engineer massive climate-controlled structures, I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they’d not only invented TV but also colonized other planets millions of years before hominids even thought of existing.