Distasteful Friday
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Blondie, 5/22/26
The sad thing here is that Alexander and Cookie can’t actually hear what Dagwood is jamming out to. Sure, we readers are privy to the truly gross stuff he’s streaming, but they’re just assuming, and even though they’re right they shouldn’t jump to such a harsh conclusion. “Wow, Daddy’s really working his earbuds” seems particularly disrespectful for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on.
Intelligent Life, 5/22/26
Gwen’s expression in the final panel here … is that a sex thing? Is “Pokemon Go” a euphemism for sex, among the dork-ass nerds of Intelligent Life? I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all!
60 replies to “Distasteful Friday”
MW-“Mrs. Worth, you’re trying to seduce me.”
MW-Tommy is already the best grocery store can stacker in the tristate area.
FC-We all know Jeffy wasn’t visited by Freddy because Jeffy gives Freddy nightmares.
Why is intelligent life drawn at that off-kilter Dutch angle? What is the black surface they’re standing in front of? Why are they only depicted chest and up? Why can’t we see what they’re doing with their hands? For the love of God, why can’t we see what they’re doing down there with their hands?!
Booker T. and The MGs, Dagwood? We’re watching the man’s taste in music improve in Real Time! What’s next? Green Jelly?! No, Dag, you ruined it!
Blondie: Sure, it’s all bubblegum fun now, but wait until Foodify starts playing highlights from “Sweeney Todd.”
S4th Finally a sensible plan for what to do with all these timeslips!
IL: “Imagine putting your throbbing Bulbasaur against my Jigglypuff!”
Young Peter Griffin shocked at a Pokemon reference? Nah, he’s just got spastic colon. The smell is about to become unbelievable!
Hell yeah, Pokémon Go, a reference that would have been relevant 10 years ago, but would have prompted the kinds of nerds portrayed in this comic to scoff and tell you they play Ingress. Congratulations, Intelligent Life: you’re a real newspaper comic.
IL: Today I learned from this strip that nerds remove their glasses but keep their contacts in place during sexual congress -and I don’t like it.
Blondie: The Apple Music juggernaut when they were asked if they wanted to be featured in today’s strip: “Nah, we’re good.”
Blondie “Dagwood Bumstead is into Mukbang Podcasts” is a sentence I couldn’t have even conceived of only a short time ago, and yet here we are…
IL Where are these two? Because it kinda looks like they’re pressing their crotches into a big screen TV in the middle of a BestBuy showroom.
MW Sooo… Mary knows Brandy left her return open-ended, but doesn’t even ask whether she quit her job and packed as if to move. She doesn’t ask whether Brandy has called/ whatsapped/ texted/ anything – and whether, if she hasn’t, Tommy’s tried to reach out. Is Moy OK? Does she think is an adequate advice/meddle session? Or did she plop down today’s platitude about people coming in and out of others’ lives in an AI chat bot and ask it to script the whole “maybe-breakup” of the last couple of weeks? This.. this isn’t even an unhealthy human response, it’s just weird
IL: My nephew has been a Pokémon fan since it first became a fad here, and he’s NEVER mentioned a sexual component. Of course, he could be sheltering his old auntie.
MW: Mary is ready, willing and able to step into Brandy’s deserted role of The Only Thing Standing Between Tommy And The Abyss.
RMMD: Don’t avid fans usually present a better visage than “constipated zombie?”
that Intelligent Life comic was definitely a sex joke they had to rewrite, I will go to my death proclaiming this truth
The Intelligent Life people have *names*?!?
IL Yeah, it’ll make Pokémon Go interesting when a bunch of nerds playing it are unable to remove the “enhanced reality” layer because it’s literally stuck on their eyes and lose any sanity-check safety guardrails about traffic and private property…
Wrecks Moregone:
Are those two Moose and Midge from the Riverdale series?
They look just like Moose and Midge from the Riverdale series.
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This is going to end with Mae Mae discovering how many people miss her, and deciding to return to acting, right?
@MKay:
Do NOT search the internet for the terms POKEMON & SEX together. Rule 34 definitely applies.
Who needs to get dumped harder, Luann or Tommy? Discuss.
Murky Tail:
“I’m the catfish! I’m the Nigerian prince who actually seems money to anyone who responds to my spam email!”
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Wary Morth:
“You just have to trust the power that is, that is, I, Mistress Mary.”
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Curtis:
“You mean ‘It wasn’t I‘, Mr Wilkins.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t you either, Mrs N.”
@MKay:
Re RMMD:
That blond man is wishing he was on Death Road….at the end of it.
MW: The best version of Tommy appears to be Owen Wilson. Which means he’ll be eaten alive by an anaconda.
Blondie: What genre of music do we think is enabling Dagwood’s auditory gluttony? I like to imagine it’s similar to Tool’s “Die Eier von Satan” [The Eggs of Satan], a heavy industrial track with the singer shouting lyrics in German. The lyrics are, in fact, a recipe for cookies. Without eggs.
This is terrible. Dagwood is listening to The Archies, as if they co-exist? If Dagwood were ever to team up with Jughead, there’d be a world hunger crisis of epic proportions.
@CanuckDownSouth: It fits, somewhat, with the theory that Charterstone is some sort of dementia village, and Mary is on staff. She doesn’t contradict the patients who think that it’s 1983, or dogs are psychic, or their girlfriends have left them forever. She just smiles and listens and spouts vague platitudes, and hopes that the occasional success like Harv will be able to leave the facility.
Blondie : “Eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, eat. Munch, munch, munch, munch. Chew, chew, chew, chew. Gorge, gorge, gorge, gorge. Burp, burp, burp, burp. Stuff lots of food in your meat-loving face! Pork chops, cream puffs, candy bars… Meat sauce, Cheetos, Mallomars… He won’t stop ’til he eats it all!”
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Crankshaft : “So, I created this mega-popular breakout character that saw me get invited as the guest of honor to countless award ceremonies… And I thought, who cares about that stuff, really? What I *REALLY* wanted to do was write
superhero comicssocially-relevant stuff that tackles the REAL ISSUE, you know, stuff that wins REAL AWARDS, not crap handed to me by a bunch of tupperware-using losers. So I decided to ignore all of thatDFinkle crap unless I needed an ego boost.”Blondie: More like “working that right pants pocket,” amIright?”
@Dan: I don’t know anything about Ingress, and I prefer to wait for the local news program to work me into a panic about how it is destroying our youth. Until then, it doesn’t even register.
@Liam: “??Hello Mary my old friend…you’ve come to meddle me again…??”
Heathcliff: Is it just me, or is there something obscene about the pink they use for the helmets in this strip? It’s been bothering me for a long time.
JP: So is Judge trying to get Ann a job, or is he angling to become a server himself? If the latter, it would literally be the most surprising and interesting plot twist in this strip in a looonnng time.
Pluggers: Pluggers would rather have someone literally drill a hole in their head than be told to lose some weight.
RxMD: So, do you think Death Road and Execut[iontrix] are part of a franchise, or is it more of a Jason Statham or JCVD thing (or more charitably, Jackie Chan) where it’s a nominally different character in a nominally different movie, but it might as well be the same character and slightly different but mostly the same movie.
Blondie:
“Daddy’s really yukking it up– he must be listening to ‘Seasons in the Sun,’ ‘One Tin Soldier’ and ‘Billy, Don’t Be a Hero’ !”‘
@Ukranazi Stepan: What’s most shocking: that the nerds of Intelligent Life have names, that one of them’s a woman, that the woman actually seems to be flirting with one of the dudes, or that Josh has actually retained the woman’s name despite it not being mentioned in this strip and despite her not appearing in any of the strips he’s featured to this point? Also, which of the last two is most disturbing?
I’m sure there’s a lot of people wanting to buy thousand dollar “smart” contact lenses, considering how frequently regular contact lenses are lost.
This comic doesn’t know anything about incel nerds in the world today, he would definitely already have an AI girlfriend and one of those hyper realistic sex dolls.
Blondie: You’re a plugger if you get all three musical references in today’s strip.
Blondie: “Hmm, what’s up after this? Oh, it’s a nice little album from the 60s…got a banana on the cover and a “chanteuse” called “Necco”…looks delicious, I’m sure it’ll be great!”
@nescio: I think we’re safe. “Sugar, Sugar” only says “yummy” twice in the chorus. I think he’s listening to Ohio Express’s similar “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.”
IL: Again, this strip makes me think so much of some of the “geek culture humor” webcomics I would come across in the Aughts and early 2010s, written by people who thought simply referencing comics, pieces of Star Wars tie-in media, or popular online RPGs counted as punchlines. The art is about as bad as a lot of these too, and many of them had the same level of relevancy to their references. All that’s missing is a all of the characters working at the same plucky little videogame publisher, or a comic shop. Oh, and a zany anthropomorphic wisecracking mascot character, like a little robot made out of a vintage videogame console, or something equally inane.
Crankshaft: “I often wondered if we heard from the same reader.” A full on oily, smug smirk would be less odious than the faint “heh, isn’t that somethin'” smile Batton often has.
FG:
Intelligent Life: Our only hope is that the male nerd is excited about playing actual Pokémon Go, rather than the rather obvious sexual double-entendre. Dear God, let’s hope he doesn’t get it! I say this as someone with many tentacles.
@Chance: I regret to inform you they’re sitting at a piano, doing the same thing with their hands that they do in 9 Chickweed Lane.
@Lauralot: What do you mean “what genre”? The first song is “Yummy Yummy Yummy” by Ohio Express. The second is “Apple Peaches Pumpkin Pie” by Jay & the Techniques. And “Green Onions” is a classic track by Booker T and the MGs. All popular hits from the 1960s.
Archie: The extremely skillful use of semiotics in today’s strip to make it impossible to date: Boom box? 1980s. Schoolmarm archetype? 1920s. Modernist glass-and-steel high-school in the background? 1960s. Liberty spikes? late 1970s. Listening to live radio? early 2000s at the absolute latest. Listening to a American Top-
4050, specifically? Present day! (That show still pulls in 20 million listeners a week!) All of these signs and signifiers combined into an contradictory, incomprehensible mishmash demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of any kind of youth culture? TIMELESSAlso Blondie: Dagwood will be sorely disappointed to find out that Eat to the Beat is neither about eating, nor by his wife, nor the tour-de-force of Parallel Lines, which is also not about geometry.
@Lauralot:
It’ll then reject him because it don’t want none, unless Tommy got buns, hon. (In which Tommy will then spiral into a very whiny 10-week depression bemoaning “Why did it leave me>”)
Intelligent Life:
‘In a ‘Most Weirdly Drawn Characters ‘ contest, who’d win? — us, or Gil Thorp?”
“Neither. That honor would go to Gasoline Alley!”
IL: Gwen can Pokémon Go to my poll.
Also IL: Speaking of contact lenses, what’s up with Skip’s eyes? Why do they narrow like a cat’s? Is this a furry thing? Please don’t say the Intelligent Life dweebs are also furries.
Blondie: “Daddy’s really working his eardrums! He’ll be deaf soon!”
@Comically Challenged: So Dagwood’s using his new earbud technology to listen to songs from 1968, 1967*, and 1962. I’d mock this, but it hits too close to home, in terms of my own listening preferences.
* I’m assuming “Apples Peaches Pumpkin Pie” is the Jay and the Techniques version, not the one later used in “Multiplication Rock.” Aaaand I’ve just earwormed myself.
@Gil Bates: #18 Duly noted. Just this once, I think I can remain uninformed.
@2 Chance: Why can’t we see their hands? You need to log into the strip’s OnlyFans to see that their hands are manually manipulating their external genitalia.
Wait… did the Blondie team actually recycle art by drawing Alexander’s head on backwards? I hate this. It’s like something from The Exorcist, except more disgusting.
Also also Blondie: Dagwood’s creepy, vaguely sexualized obsession with food makes it easy to miss his devotion to Boomer nostalgia, at least until you notice he’s slow-humping your leg to Booker T. & the M.G.s.
@28 Charterstone: Dune: on Judge Parker: No, he’s trying to get a job for Charlotte. He doesn’t like that Neddy spends so much time with her.
@32 Comically Challenged: Wait, what? Those are actual song titles? I thought they were made up.
Is… Dagwood listening to the sounds of people eating? And they’re doing it extra-loud, and he’s developed his aural palette to the point where he can tell the difference between someone eating a peach and someone chomping into an apple? I was going to say “no weirder than ASMR,” but it is! It really is!
MW:
“Who exactly are the powers that be, anyway, Mary?”
“Well, that would be Tyrone Power, Cat Power and JD Power.”
“Thanks, Mary! Gosh, you’re really swell!”
Foodify doesn’t play entire songs… Ha ha ha, no! That costs money! They just play the lyrics that are even vaguely food related, like “Yummy yummy yummy” from the eponymous hit from The Archies. For song with no lyrics? Don’t worry, the guy who is running the whole thing from his basement will pop in and announce the title because whoever is writing Blondie thinks Spotify works just like radio.
@Powers: I’ll be honest: It never occurred to me that those were real songs. I thought the writer just put food names and related words into the speech bubbles at random.
“You know how people get disgusted by the sound of chewing? Well, it is ASMR for dad! He’s a creep!”
Lost in his extremely niche fetish involving Pokémon, sex, and corrected vision, the male forgets to notice the end of the escalator and, to the delight of all, is grated into mush by the comb bearer.
A Pokémon Go reference in the year of our Lord 2026? Hilary Clinton had a better pulse of young people!
@Baja Gaijin: I’m sure having an uncannily self-aware, preternaturally observant 7-year-old waiting on customers will do wonders for the business! There’s nothing hide-bound, curmudgeonly sexagenarian diners like more that being forced to confront their life choices far too late over weak coffee and corned-beef hash.
Intelligent Life:
The thing about the Matrix is that it connects directly to your brain. It doesn’t use your eyeballs at all, so these contact lenses are not “literally connected to the Matrix”. I haven’t seen the movie in over twenty years, but I still know this, so I feel justified expecting the alleged nerds in this strip to understand the basic facts about the nerd shit they are referencing. (Pokémon Go, on the other hand, uses augmented reality and could very well be played with sufficiently advanced contact lenses, so I’ll allow it.)
Daddy, in today’s ‘Daddy Daze’, is quoting a famous political figure but the name was redacted.
Six Chix: Maybe you should switch to a different church?