Young people and their food foibles
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Archie, 6/6/26
I guess the joke here is that Archie, who we mostly know through his romantic misadventures but who is in many ways still a boy, likes Ninja Turtles cereal, this being a rerun from the ’90s or ’00s when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were popular (not going to bother checking those dates, life’s too short), and the household caters to his culinary whims, much to his father’s distress. I do like Archie’s mom’s facial expression in the last panel. “Ha ha, he says he won’t eat it, but he’s gonna eat it. What’s he going to do, go shopping himself and pick out his own cereal? I don’t fuckin’ think so.”
Blondie, 6/6/26
There’s a lot of sad stuff you see in Blondie and I guess I should be inured to it by now, but I’m sorry, this is among the saddest. Blondie is clutching her hands together with a forced look of joy on her face and telling her daughter about how wonderful her third date with her husband was, but in her thought balloon we can see she clearly thought she was going to be doing some light making out on this park bench but is horrified and disappointed to discover that young Dagwood has simply collapsed into some kind of meat coma, and now she can’t decide if she should just get up and leave him there or what. I was going to make a joke about how she should be a flapper in the flashback, but the whole scenario is so grim that I simply don’t have the energy.
32 replies to “Young people and their food foibles”
In panel one, Cookie is folding her arms as tightly as Marvin’s grandpa on the bark bench. The word “relax” activates her programming.
Comic strip aging being what it is, Archie’s dad won’t eat Ninja Turtles cereal because, having grown up in the 80s, he’s very much more a “Gobots” kid.
Archie’s dad: She knows! That’s why she didn’t give you a spoon!
Archie : “I want GI JOE cereal! Or at least the GHOSTBUSTERS!”
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Crankshaft : We already know who the band playing then was, we read it clearly in earlier strips; it was The Larry Dinkle Big Band…
OH NO.
I’ve figured out why this storyline is called “In the Name of the Father”.
This is a storyline about Harry Dinkle reconciling with his dad, them having gotten estranged over how one chose Swing and Jazz, and the other chose Classical and Marching Band music.
IT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH EUGENE MOVING TO A DIFFERENT PLACE, THAT POINT WILL PROBABLY NEVER BE ELUCIDATED.
***************
Luann : …I’ve got a LOT to say about today’s comic, but will limit myself to “Who’s bringing back the car?” Do the DeGroots have TWO cars? Does Luann somehow have her own car? Is Camp Skye just a day camp and Luann (and the campers and other counselors) just drive home every day?
Because otherwise that car is stuck in the Californian wilderness for the next two weeks, and the DeGroots don’t have wheels anymore.
Blondie: Early on Dagwood was out of the strip for three years. He was brought back by popular request. Blondie’s morose face in the flashback insert gives everyone a lesson in giving in to peer pressure.
Archie If you want to choose what you eat, how about you pick up the cereal box and pour it into your own darn bowl (and if there isn’t a cereal box that you like, pick up something else).
Archie:
Why don’t you sprinkle it with rogaine and wolf it down, Mr. Andrews? — maybe that’ll help you “up top,” you curmudgeon!
Blondie – I, for one, am happy that Blondie is not dressed as a flapper. Sure, that means the strip has forgotten its own lore, but it also frees us from difficult questions like “If Blondie and Dagwood were dating in the flapper era, wouldn’t they be like 130 by now?” Those questions are best left in the Funkyverse and the worst imponderable we should have to deal with here is Dagwood’s sartorial choices. Oh – and why there was a fourth date after this.
Blondie:
“As you can see from today’s third panel, ‘Daddy’ and I looked just like we do now when we were dating 20+ years ago, because in this strip, time has no meaning!”
Archie — So here’s the thing I’ve always wanted to know. In Dr. Suess’s story, are both the eggs and ham green, as in green eggs and green ham, or are just the eggs green, as in green eggs and (normal) ham? IMHO, the catchphrase can be read in either way. Clearly Archie’s dad believes the former, but is his view canonical?
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@Anonymous: re: Luann I’m stuck on how it would take 30 seconds to get her attention by cell phone call (yes, yes, not while driving but [1] if you believe that she drives safely, have I got a bridge for you and [2] message she’d find at her first rest stop before she drives 10 hours, so she can easily return) but I’ll bet we get a roughing-it-with-no-pillow subplot.
@Anonymous:
Oh and I forgot :
Moose & Molly : MAPLE SYRUP DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY! We’re THREE MONTHS out of season! And you need to boil it before it’s the right concentration!
Archie:
Today’s rock trivia factoid: the line “Honey; oh, sugar, sugar” from the Archies’ iconic “Sugar, Sugar” was actually written about the ingredients of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cereal.
@But What Do I Know?: The drawings clearly show *both* are green – green yolks and green meat (white for the sunny-side-up egg whites and the required bone in the ham)
Archie’s dad eating vintage 38 year old Ninja Turtles breakfast cereal would be something that’d go viral on TikTok. Next he’s got to drink some of the original Hi-C Ecto Cooler!
Mary Worth:
“Don’t look to your right, Tommy! — the supernova that just exploded in our second panel will burn your corneas out!”
Every time we see Dagwood’s upper chest is an absolute horror show. Folds of skin like he was once much heavier, but… only in the area around his collarbone? And now he lost that extremely localized weight, and there are flaps of distended skin only on his upper chest and neck? It is not just this drawing, look at the strip of him in the bath last week (wrestling out of a security guard’s grip) I am not a crackpot, listen to me!
Archie: This would have been a perfect time for a ‘He-Man’ reference. (As seen in the new blockbuster movie ‘Masters of the Universe’, Now Playing Only in Theaters!)
S4th: After Hilary the ‘Little Angel’ leaves the table, Sally and Ted (if they had two brain cells to rub together) look at each other. ‘Summer job?’ ‘Summer job!’
GT: Apply for a job writing at Salon, Slate, or The Daily Beast? Start your own Substack? Or did you mean something that might actually be effective in the long-term?
JP: ‘You finally want to talk about that fracas in the coffee shop?’
Ph: What, does Schmelon Schmusk have another doohickey that broadcast the message “I’m coming to bust you out! I’ll be the one in the stupid alien mask!” directly to this guy’s brain or something?
RMMD: Suddenly I’m getting visions of Vivien Leigh, Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen from ‘Gone With the Wind’ for some reason… I can’t *possibly* imagine why…
@Anonymous: Please, hold forth on Luann if you wish. I want to say stuff too, but it left me completely stymied.
@CanuckDownSouth: No no, Daddy will make that 10-hour trip in their other car (which I think is a big SUV thirsty for that $8 a gallon California gas!) to drop it off. She can’t be without her Snoopy bedsheets to match her skimpy Snoopy nightshirt!
RMMD Stop – just, just stop. Quit trying to make this “we saved the hotel restaurant with one day of interest in gawking at a former movie star here” plot make sense. Every detail added to try to plug a plothole just showcases more of them. Now you’re going to be able to afford a “hostess” position? Hector’s crew doesn’t have any other jobs to juggle? wouldn’t prefer to keep cooking rather than deal with the public as servers? And once again this is a one-day wonder, why do you think this means you’ve got a sustained increase in business??
@CanuckDownSouth:
Also, I’m just going to say it, Beatty doesn’t know how to draw Hispanic people. Take a good look at Hector in that last panel. Take away his 1950s Zorro mustache, replace the baseball cap with a plastic hair helmet and he’s Rex in brownface!
When that thought struck me, I immediately flashed back to one day during a visit to Pike Place Market in Seattle I was looking through vintage advertisements in a shop and came across one for a brand of starch, or shirts (or something like that) with what looked like a maid and butler (who looked like they were in their 20s) discussing the product. The illustration was in that light, airy, 1950s watercolor style. However, said maid and butler were clearly (and I mean *clearly*) originally designed as Caucasian but were made to look black! No joke, it looked like they’d blacked themselves up to be in a minstrel show. And yes, the copy was written in that “Sho’ nuff!” dialect.
BLONDIE: She’s ashamed to remember herself as a flapper. Any flapper with an ounce of flap in her would’ve stuffed Dagwood into the nearest phone booth and strutted away.
Nice. Hopefully it will remain a bad pun free day.
MW: The inanity of this three-day conversation is partly explained if you assume “Fab Fro-Yo” is a real shop and Moy and Brigman got a sponsorship deal.
@The Quiet Man: Archie: This would have been a perfect time for a ‘He-Man’ reference.
The downside of recycling old art is dealing with the word balloons. Here the original had “NINJA TURTLES”, so “HE-MAN” would leave an obvious gap, while “MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE” is way too long to fit.
I want panel three of “Archie” on a t-shirt, just to confuse people.
Archie: I like how Mr Andrews includes oatmeal in his list of terrible things he’d sooner eat than NT cereal. “My shitter’s just fine, thank you.”
JP: Remarkable to think that when we last saw Sophie and Reena, it was November and Oslo was getting seven hours of daylight. Now, as we near the summer solstice, they get over eighteen hours a day. With so much change in the physical world, it’s comforting to know that nothing whatsoever will have changed in Sophie and Reena’s lives since the characters were shelved seven months ago.
MW:
@The Quiet Man: Still better than a LOT of old comics where artists who drew white people very well would draw blacks as crude ape like creatures who didn’t resemble any human ever.
FC: Two girls talking about sports and the writer carefully avoids the word ‘mound’. Smart move.
Bizarro – sadly true
DT – why hasn’t soly tare relocated to a new place?
JP – Is there some contracture obligation for the ditzy girls to appear?
RMMD – as a lark or reality show it can be amusing but as a business plan this seems dubious. If the food wasn’t drawing them earlier once the novelty wears (and it will fast) then the business collapses – due to overextension, taking on more staff, and costs.
Archie has met the ninja turtles. They exist in the same universe.
No, really.
https://bookriot.com/crossing-the-streams-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-and-archie/
I mean, I guess technically I should write, “No, fictionally!” but that sounds wrong.