Friday one-liners
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Shoe, 8/7/26
I guess Skyler passive-aggressively hinted that it would be nice if he and his uncle/guardian ate together once in a while, so the Perfesser has decided to passive-aggressively book dinner for the two of them at a restaurant where they won’t be allowed to talk to each other.
Blondie, 8/7/26
“I’m so glad I grew up in the offline generation … and also don’t know any kids and haven’t given really any thought at all about the practicalities of what going to school in the modern age might be like.”
Mary Worth, 8/7/26
Damn, can you imagine what a bummer it would be if you had the chance to enjoy the amazing high that only methamphetamines can deliver, but you somehow end up in this scenario instead?
52 replies to “Friday one-liners”
Mary Worth:
“C’mon, let’s all knock down a beer — group chug!”
“Dawn can hold her own — I just don’t want her holding yours!”
“I know it’s against the commandments and all, but I covet that former felon drug addict’s mop of hair!,” muses Wilbur.
Blondie is in fierce competition with Crock for the most technologically backwards strip. So far it’s losing, since it at least knows what a phone looks like and at least vaguely how text messages work.
Blondie:
“If you blocked her, how do you know you got an ‘online’ detention, Elmo?”
“Listen, Mr. Bumstead, I don’t write this stuff. They just draw a speech bubble next to me!”
MW – Dawn’s finally getting the ménage à trois she’s dreamed of ever since she saw that Seinfeld episode.
Shoe:
“Are children welcome?”
“Kids? — they’re for the birds!”
MW: Is it me, or is Dawn at a slightly larger scale than either of her companions? And where is Tommy looking? Toward the heavens, to pray for escape from the clammy embrace of mayonnaise?
Shoe: “Before you hang up, please know that we really earn that $400 in enforcing the rules.”
Blondie: Kudos to the Blondie creative team for demonstrating that screen addiction is nothing new. It’s multigenerational. The screens have just gotten smaller.
MW: “Hmmm,” Wilbur thinks, “people are capable of personal growth and self-improvement? Wow, that’s a real surprise to me. I literally had no idea. I’ll have to apply this newly-acquired knowledge to my job as an advice columnist. Maybe this is what my articles have been missing.”
Shoe I really hate that sky look that the Perfesser is giving in the final panel, as if he’s finally cracked the code. Dude, no child would be at any place you’d be eating, no parent wants to have to explain your whole deal to their kids.
MW “Group hug! That’s where you awkawardly press your torsos into each other and make a face like baby passing gas, right? What a fun moment to share with my fellow hu-mans…”
MW: “Do hugs, not drugs” might be a catchy slogan, but consider: what if the hug involved Wilbur?
MW: This might just be the glurgiest glurge that ever glurged.
JP: Neddy, what’s worse? That this chirpy little voice on the phone cannot possibly be our pissy, psychotic CIApril, or that you were caught sneaking off to Hollywood and leaving the raspberry-haired brat in the care of the *other* pissy, psychotic blonde woman in this comic? Either way, be careful, or you’ll turn into the Randy Ape (still some of the most deliciously stupid yet strangely captivating art this strip has ever produced).
S4th: Hooray! Ted’s finally having a fatal heart attack! Don’t let the pitchfork hit you on the way down!
CS: Five days. Five days they have been staring at this little flame and done *nothing* to snuff it out. Good thing ‘climate damage’ is a hoax and Ohio has gotten *plenty* of rain this summer, otherwise they might have been in trouble!!
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX: [makes silent screaming face like George at the end of the ‘Labelmaker’ episode]
Mark Trail: I’m setting up a pool on how many strips it’s going to take before Rusty’s lost in the flooding cave. Come on, a “Do Not Enter” sign on a potentially-flooding cave is pretty much irresistible to idiots.
Slylock Fox: That hippo just finished whacking off in the pool. Totally. Pobrecito, pato.
Six Chix: I’d figure the “Best Ideas Ever” notepad would be located just about the tramp stamp area, since most of the Six Chix’s “best ideas” are pulled from between their gluteus maximuses (maximi?).
@The Quiet Man:
On Crankshaft : a single spark from a golf club lightly scratching a small stone causes all of Los Angeles to burn to the ground. A lithium battery fire on a dry lawn barely rates higher than a birthday cake sparkler, or one of those “snake” pseudo-“fireworks”.
GT: If Gil were to half-ass being mayor like he half-asses coaching, he might have a whole-ass job!
Heathcliff: Is the joke there that the mice had been milking the cows, and now that he’s gotten rid of the mice, Heathcliff has to milk the cows? Is that what’s going on here?
MT: Oh he’ll yeah! Cave adventure incoming! Who do you think it’ll be who ignores the sign? Nü Rusty is nowhere as stupid as OG Rusty, so I’m thinking it’ll be that ranger’s asshole kid.
MW: Gross.
Blondie Online summer school? Is Elmo *that* far behind from hanging out with Dagwood instead of doing his homework?
RMMD: If they’re going to make this work, first thing is to lose that showy mom car and steal a windowless van.
LUANN: No worries, Phil; who DOESN’T want a roomie who micromanages every aspect of their life?
SHOE: Kids aren’t welcome, but it’s OK to bring a clutch of eggs with you.
MW: If this is a PSA for “don’t do drugs,” it’s lost on me.
RMMD – They’re going to kidnap the wrong girl with black hair
Blondie: Mrs. Godfrey must have gotten a transfer from P.S. 38.
Mary Worth
When reading this strip and witnessing the weirdly worded worrues, outlandish cruise ship disasters, mental muffin mending moments (read gaslighting), and
sometimesmosttimes nonsensical love-thy-Wilbur moments, I wonder if I am indeed sober…I was about to make a comment that Wilbur should consider that people in glass houses should not throw stones. Then I realised that everyone already made that comment. THEN I realised that there must be some sort of prize for the one thousandth jab at Wilbur smugness and self-righteousness and that’s a competition I want in!
FLASH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! Suddenly, Prince Vultan awakens and uses his outside voice, which is his inside voice but weaponized, and destroys the incoming ships.
Blondie, 8/7/26: Why is Elmo playing with a Barbie Volkswagen?
Blondie: Unlike the business sector, which has responded to increased connectivity by demanding the attention of employees 24-7, the current view in education is that children benefit from less homework than preceding generations, not more. So the joke makes even less sense than it does on the surface, which makes no sense at all.
MW: The text says “group hug” but the art says “lesbian officiant blessing the union of the two least desirable gay men on the planet.”
Shoe: This is weirdly passive aggressive (why not just bar anyone under 18? It’s not just for sex clubs anymore!), but in a way that somehow makes complete sense for the weirdly passive-aggressive characters in Shoe, so points for consistency, I guess.
Mary Worth
You know how sometimes when your dog goes near something gross and in visceral recoil and horror you shout out: “Get away from that thing!!” or “Don’t touch that!!”..?
Yeah, that’s my first reaction about Tommy hugging Wilbur – after all, Tommy just got “clean” on so many levels.
@Left Nut: Oh god, I’ll bet you’re right, and this will lead to the most schmaltzy Very Special Moment ever as the twins learn the True Meaning of Something from Sarah’s friend.
“No problem, Tommy, I no longer worry about you! I fully sympathise with you!”
“Thanks Mr Weston!”
“I admire the heroic resolve it takes to resist your worst impulses! I know how hard it is for me not to spy from your mother’s window!”
“Thank… wait, what!?”
“And these days I resist doing it 4 times out of 10, which is not bad!”
MW: has it honestly never crossed Wilbur’s wee feral brain that helping Tommy’s recovery might open a pathway into Iris’s pants?
Mary Worth
And to think Wilbur could have been Tommy’s step-father…
shudder
Hey, Dawn, leave room for Jesus! Not that I think close body contact is sinful, but maybe Wilbur would benefit from some Jesus.
Technological progress and educational institutions as tools of totalitarian control? I REALLY did not expect a Blondie/Foucault crossover! Baudrillard maybe
C’shaft: Great, Crankshaft’s discovered the destructive potential of modern electronics. Maybe that’s how the Burnings started.
Dustin: She’s moved on from “frowning” to “desperately texting her friend a picture of Dustin and Dustfriend in case she happens to go missing after leaving the bar tonight.”
GT: Why would Gil want to be mayor? Isn’t he already the god-king of Milford?
Luann: Maybe Luann is the ideal roommate for Phil. Anyone else who had to listen to his laundry nagging would have thrown bleach in his eyes by now.
MT: Your idiot son and his idiot scout buddies, for starters.
RMMD: What, no “aka Rene Belluso” text box? How will the memory care patients keep up?
SH: Not that I expect accuracy in this from a strip that thinks narwhal tusks are nose horns, but kaiju are not exclusively aquatic in origin…
@Ettorre: Please, the last thing we need is for someone as self-absorbed, judgemental and insensitive as Wilbur to discover religion…
If we take publication start in 1930, Dagwood’s childhood was under Wilson/Harding, so of course he was not online. But if we use sliding timescale, Dagwood’s childhood should be under Clinton, so he could have been online. But let’s be honest, Dagwood is neither a 120 years old immortal, nor a 40 years old man with teenage children. Dagwood represents the age of the average reader, so he is a 75 years old Boomer obsessed with cowboys, no food more exotic than pizza and kids these days. The power of sliding timescale is no much to the power of the aging demographic of a dying industry
Blondie: Online… detention? Where kids have to show up in a chatroom, and then they’re free to do whatever they want online as long as they say “present” when their names are called, I guess?
@TheDiva: It would make Mary Worth a more realistic portrayal of the country
MW-Later that night a satisfied look on Wilbur’s face. “Was it good for you,” he asks.
RMMD-No footnote about who Uncle Jimmy is? How can I carry on my day without knowing who Uncle Jimmy really is?
Peace and quiet evoke not just lack of chaos and distress, but the final end of chaos and distress, i.e. death. So maybe is a carrion-themed restaurant
Shoe: Initially, I missed Cosmo’s smirk at the phone in the second panel. I’ve never seen a character depict an inner monologue so subtly and vividly. It’s unfortunate that his inner monologue is “Ha! Let the children starve!” but that’s just the world we live in, I guess.
“You seem sincere in wanting to stay sober! And addicts are well known to never lie!”
“You seem sincere and I am a good judge of character! Ask my fake son! Or my gold-digging girlfriend! Or my clinically insane girlfriend!”
@Left Nut: considering that even *we* can tell them apart by hair style, the Doublemint Scam Twins’ powers of observation are… actually just as bad as you’d expect for a bwa-ha-haa! we have successfully gotten money with a false sob story while busking! pair
Shoo!: I was really hoping they’d use the old Twilight Zone “To Serve Man” setup in a more interesting way. Such as, “Do you serve children? You do? Great, I’d like to order three.” Seeing how birds lay eggs and it’s already more or less established that the bird-creatures in Shoe eat foods that contain eggs, it’s clear they must have a set of rules governing the consumption of their own young, and I for one would find a deep dive into those rules and customs far more interesting than the throw-away gag we got today.
You know how Dante depicts Satan as one body with three faces? What if it is a group hug with the faces of Tommy, Dawn and Wilbur?
@Bob Tice: Mary Worth:
“C’mon, let’s all knock down a beer — group chug!”
_________
“C’mon lets all punch Wilber —– group slug!”
DT: OK – so a technically sophisticated ransomware hacker is going to be brought down because Dick did classic police gumshoe work – going door to door, knocking on doors, talking with neighbors. Will we see Dick shoot the badguy?
GT: So is Gil going to be like a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington moment, and has to filibuster the Milford town hall meeting and so inspires the audience that Marty Moon breaks down.
JP: What is Neddy hiding? Why is so afraid that April goes over there to seek out Charlotte? She has a cell phone and at her age she clearly should know how to use it.
RMMD: The second appearance of the car obviously taken from a reference photo means the car can be written off for tax purposes?
Even though they are decades apart in age, Sarah and that older woman she is visiting are drawn in a similar way wearing similar clothing. Do the DoubleDim Twins jump and grab the older woman by mistake?
Will Rex and June be heading towards a cartoon strip version of High and Low (based on Evan Hunter’s King’s Ransom and made into Akira Kurosaw’s film High and Low and remade by Spike Lee as Highest 2 Lowest).
Rex has to mortgage the clinic and house and June empties her 401k but then realize the Sarah is fine.
@Lauralot: I think you may be right, maybe Brigman found this too ridiculous to draw and slapdashed together old art without rescaling. Although I’m not sure she’s done Dawn like that, maybe she did erase some wrinkles and quickly redo the hair on a Mary face.
@Ettorre: Traditionally Satan’s three faces represent the opposites of God’s omniscience, omnibenevolence, and omnipotence; thus, Ignorance, Hatred, and Impotence. Matching those to Tommy, Dawn, and Wilbur is left as an exercise for the reader.
@Ettorre: [Narrator] Wilbur did not benefit from Jesus.
That’s great to hear about Josh’s book. I’ve been really enjoying his comics blog for years, so I’m looking forward to seeing what he created with The Enthusiast.