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Hi and Lois, 1/28/20

True story: When I was a kid and my mom first got an answering machine, her mother did not know how to deal with it, and would leave messages like she was talking to a person who wasn’t us, e.g., “[long awkward pause, then speaking very slowly] Tell Carol that mother called.” Anyway, this is just to say that Lois clearly has a physical answering machine attached to a landline, not “voice mail,” and you can’t listen to the latter in real time, so I question when this strip was actually written, or at least when the joke was conceived. I also don’t think we’ve ever seen Lois’s mother appear in the strip, so maybe she’s running to the phone to turn down the volume, because she doesn’t want her kids to know they have grandparents.

Mark Trail, 1/28/20

So, uh, the Mark Trail art is continuing to shift and change even outside the context of Dr. Camel’s flashback? Not sure if this is meant to represent everyone slowly losing their mind due to oxygen deprivation or if new-ish artist James Allen is trying to put his own visual stamp on the strip rather than hewing to the models established by his predecessors, but the important thing is that Mark and Harvey are going to snipe at each other until they freeze to death.

Gil Thorp, 1/28/20

Finally, something interesting is happening in Gil Thorp: the bully clique is going to mess with the aspiring valedictorian by playing what I firmly expect to be a series of escalating fart noises during his oral report. I hope this goes on for weeks.

Dick Tracy, 1/28/20

Mister Roboto acts like he’s mad that he has to mansplain Styx’s concept album Kilroy Is Here to a sexy part-alien lady dressed as a robot who he’s tied to a chair, but let’s be clear: he’s very excited that he gets to mansplain Styx’s concept album Kilroy Is Here to a sexy part-alien lady dressed as a robot who he’s tied to a chair.