Your boring-ass house is not where in the world
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Hi and Lois, 10/25/26
Given how much time I spent parsing Hi’s fantasy self-image as a young Major Leaguer a few weeks ago, I’m kind of tickled by his vision of his real childhood, where he looks exactly like he does now, same haircut and everything, except smaller, and his dad looks exactly like he does now except with a mustache. Speaking of Hi’s dad, it’s kind of weird that Hi and Lois are probably in their early 40s at the oldest and they never seem to visit or be visited by their parents, right? I guess spending fall weekends cheerfully breathing in a toxic mix of fine particulate matter and carcinogenic chemicals might have something to do with it.
Heathcliff, 10/25/26
Not to be a downer about it, but a big bone-in ham like that is basically a corpse, right? Or at least a sizable chunk of one? So I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that it’s inhabited by a vengeful ghost of some kind, though the fact that it’s haunted by three of them implies that we know a lot less about matters of the spirit than we may think.
Mary Worth, 10/25/26
Lot going on here, but the panel I’m really hung up on is “People gossip about things they don’t comprehend.” I mean, I buy that most people don’t comprehend why Toby and Ian are together. That’s because they don’t know them well enough to get a sense of the various personality problems that have significantly limited both of their romantic prospects.
Panel from Dick Tracy, 10/25/26
Oh, come on, Crimestoppers Textbook! Carmen Sandiego and her coconspirators at V.I.L.E. have their sights set on stealing historic treasures and natural monuments. They have no time for petty door-to-door-salesperson scams!
51 replies to “Your boring-ass house is not where in the world”
MW:
“Toby, what do you say we talk a little about whether maybe we should have a little Ian? You know, a youngster that I can teach how to toss the caber while running through the Charterstone common areas with me, and who can join me in eating animal viscera !”
DT: DO IT, ROCKAPELLA!
Heathcliff:
You know, I’ve never dropped acid and have no intention of ever doing so, but if I were to, I bet I’d understand Heathcliff better.
H&L: One of my earliest memories as a kid is a neighbor setting a pile of leaves on fire on a windy day. The burning leaves blew all over the place setting the property line hedges on fire. The fire department coming and dragging hoses all around and spraying pockets of burning brush was certainly exiting and does evoke a certain level of nostalgia when I see suburbanites acting like idiots.
Hi and Lois-“And the smell of Old Man Crankshaft’s burnt flesh.”
RMMD-“I’m stuffed.” Not yet you aren’t.
MW-In Maui you won’t have to see what happens to Nelly.
MW-“Love conquers all but nothing beats a good Roman sword.”
MW: In P4, Toby rubs the lamp next to her bed before she shuts the light.
“Shucks. Someday I’m going to find the one with the genie.”
H&L: “How can you get nostalgic about air pollution?”
Said no teenage boy raised in a semi-normal household about anything involving fire, ever. IRL, Chip would *understand* why they can’t light the leaves up in a glorious albeit brief bonfire, but he would also be feeling a certain amount of sadness about it.
Also, Josh, have you ever been around a campfire?
Heathcliff: It’s a ham that’s on wheels, appears to be self-propelled, and is large enough for Heathcliff to sit in it. That whatever blasphemous ritual used to create this device resulted in it only being inhabited by three ghosts is a testament to the skill of its maker in the dark arts, and if it’s Heathcliff himself that would explain much of the goings-on in the strip.
Hi and Lois:
“My dad had a mustache just like Chef Boyardee, and as you can see, it was just as fake!”
Hi and Lois:
“And when Dad was out there sweeping, Mom would look at him through the window and yell out, ‘Oh, look! — two rakes!’ “
Heathcliff: If you fashion a chunk of flesh into a car, the ghost will be forced to possess the vehicle and compell it to move. On the one hand, it’s an atrocity to capture an immortal soul and bind it to labour for all eternity. On the other hand, it’s good for the environment.
MW: “Elephants conquer all.” —Hannibal
MW (minutes later) “Ii..Ian..? wha – that’s a new move – why?” “Oh, um, I’ve been … reading women’s magazines for sex tips. Lots of them. Really. Everything new with me is from reading off the page, I _am_ a scholar, after all. Right? Right! definitely nothing taught by another person…”
RMMD (throwaways) Once again I am _pleading_ with the writer to please, please leave us out of his sex codes!
MW:
And the Clods Made Love.
— James Marshall Hendrix (adapted)
MW: I’m not entirely sure what love needed to conquer here. Toby herself thought the rumors were ridiculous — well, until one line from a parrot. Is that what love had to conquer, parrots?
MW:
Ian’s Brobdingnagian girth suggests that instead of working on a dissertation, he was working on a dessert station.
Did Ian Know about the rumors? Seems like it from his response! I believe that Ian would not bother to do anything to quell his rumors, let alone assuage his wife who is tormented by them, but I’m less willing to believe that Ian was allowed to know something that Mary didn’t.
Judging from the saisfied look on Heathcliff’s face in the last panel of the second row, I’d say those so-called “ghosts” are really manifestations of Heathclff’s farts.
@matt w: I think that’s just Moy’s frequent confusion between what she knows and what the characters know. But yeah, there should have been a “What rumors?” line from Ian — which could have led to him being the one to track down Nelly, though I’m thinking we’re still at best 50/50 on that ever happening.
Apparently the rest of today’s Dick Tracy was too boring to show, or perhaps Josh was concerned it would deter too much from the joke.
I’m starting to believe that Heathcliff is a reality warper, and existence is his plaything.
While all the people can do is make small talk on the lines of “It’s good that Heathcliff did that…”
SlyF – At last, we have our Mary Worth crossover. C’mon, Apple Mary could never have afforded to pay retail for her inventory!
“Yeah, I’ll have the haunted ham on pumpkinickel, with monster cheese, aaaaaieoli, and cole slawter.”
“Get the hell out of my deli.”
@The Rambling Otter: You’d be right.
Dick Tracy, Carmen Sandiego is the literal greatest thief in all of fiction.
It’s very telling that under the trope “Impossible Theft” she has an entire section just for her on the main page, and she’s the only character to get that honor.
RMMD – I could possibly, on a generous day, believe Americans would order a dessert in an Asian restaurant. There is no scenario where I could believe one would then say “that was great” unless they thought staff could hear them and wanted to be polite.
Heathcliff: “I saw a cat driving a ham! Seriously, let me show you, I got a picture of…hey! It’s just his head, surrounded by total whiteness? And…you can barely see his head. Well, that just makes me feel like dropping my food on the floor to eat it. Yeah, I’m rat-bastard pathetic.”
As the resident scholar of recent Hi and Lois, the grandparents are usually outside the Object Permanence Radius, but one of them has shown up. I think that’s Lois’s mother, who is also Beetle Bailey’s mother, which might be part of the reason she gets kept off-stage.
@Bob Tice: @Bob Tice: From what I’ve… err… been told about psychedelic experiences, Heathcliff actually is closer to a 104 degree fever-dream.
H&K- looking at the resemblance between Hi and his dad, I’m sorry to tell him “The Baratheon line breeds true.” Since Beetle always wears a cap, we don’t know if he’s blonde, but I’m guessing so.
Pluggers: Sudden anger in dementia patients is due to physical changes in the brain and not intentional misbehavior.
—And a tip O’ the hat to Barry ‘Fuck Off’ Sparks of York, Pennsylvania.
In the childhood photograph we’ve seen of Hi’s father, he looks nothing like that. What he looks like is a very young Thirsty Thurston, and thus Chip. And young HI’s mother looks exactly like Irma and… look I have to assume they were childhood sweethearts as next door neighbors, coming over to each other’s house to listen to their favorite radio serial. That strip is from 2000 so the ages check out a little, though I think the 1930s style cathedral radio might be pushing it.
MW- pretty vanilla guys. I thought she’d make Ian wear a parrot costume, or he’d make Toby wear a lilac cowl dress.
I distinctly remember a strip (possibly Thanksgiving-adjacent) where the Flagstons visited the Bailey grandparents (identified by their name on their mailbox), possibly with a photo of Beetle on the credenza.
Hi and Lois: Oh, just dump some dead leaves on the grill and burn them, Hi. No one will mind! Have a leaf huffing party. Definitely invite Thirsty.
Beetle Bailey is giving Sarge second-hand ADHD.
FC: Jeffy’s been doing his own research on how to prevent disease, hasn’t he?
H&L: Back in Hi’s youth (sometime in the late 1920s), accidental forest fires started by burning fallen leaves were relabeled land clearing for farmers.
Slylock Fox should be doing something useful on Halloween such as:
Wicked Weasel was accused of egging Granny Squirrel’s house and blaming it on rambunctious first-graders. What did Slylock Fox deduce which cleared Wicked ?
(??u??ds??o ??n?n? s,u?H ?uu?? ?I?) ?uo s??d ???l?? s?? ??? u?? ?? ??? ????? ??? o? ?u?o? s,?H ?s???ss??????? ‘l?s??? ? s,?H :uo??nloS
BG&SS: Sam went to the big city and searched “Cheat your way to victory by injecting your pumpkin with water” on that newfangled internet. Don’t bother saving him.
A&J: Janis has the right idea and certainly has figured out that the kids near her new home like the same candies she does.
Pluggers: Never thought I’d say this, but: Pluggers don’t watch enough infomercials, or they’d have bought that jar opening thingy a decade ago.
@ValdVin:
(Apologies; that doesn’t post like it previews. A proper go:)
Slylock Fox should be doing something useful on Halloween such as:
Wicked Weasel was accused of egging Granny Squirrel’s house and blaming it on rambunctious first-graders. What did Slylock Fox deduce which cleared Wicked ?
Solution: He’s a weasel, ferchrissakes. He’s going to eat every egg he can get his filthy paws on. (RIP Jenny Hen’s future offspring.)
“People will gossip about things they don’t comprehend, like me being attracted to a woman over 50. Speaking of which, I see you have a birthday coming up, but never mind that.”
Hi and Lois:
Hi’s father is enjoying that fire a bit too much, if you ask me. I’m guessing the real reason he never comes to visit his son’s family is that he’s currently serving a life sentence for burning down an orphanage.
I am all for bursting nostalgia bubbles, but Hi is actually taking time to share the burden of yard work instead of unloading it all on his children like most comic strips dad. Chip could be a little bit more appreciative!
“I’ll take you to Maui, where you will forget all about those false rumours!”
“Oh Ian!”
“And even about the real ones!”
“What?”
“Nothing!”
DT: Loose lips sink ships. And even retirement savings!
After reading the awkwardly phrased title and before getting to the bottom, I thought the title had a typo and it was commenting on the gradient void Hi and the twins are walking through in the throwaway panel. Their house is, literally, nowhere in the world.
MW: “Take you to Maui” is Ian’s creative way of bragging about what he does in bed, unfortunately.
Heathcliff:
The butcher explaining that this ham is haunted leads me to believe he’s the one who sold it to Heathcliff after the cat came in and nonverbally asked for meat so infested with the spirits of the dead it could be used as a means of self-propelled transportation. Heathcliff wanting such a whimsical thing is par for the course, but the fact that the butcher was able to provide it makes me think his MEAT store is hiding some dark secrets. What other unnatural flesh does he have in the back of his shop, where his normal customers can’t see it? Possessed pork? Ghostly guanciale?
“Toby, people will gossip about things they don’t comprehend. Have you seen who was whispering behind our backs? Tommy, Dawn, Wilbur… Their intellectual skills are abysmal, which leaves them plenty to gossip about!”
“We’re heading out to help Chip”. I’m sorry, out of where? You are not inside a building, you are in an endless, featureless void!
“Tonight was fun, wasn’t it”
“Yes, I enjoyed it”
Notably, these words are said as they go to bed, not after
MW — It occurs to me that Ian would say the exact same words if he *was* having an affair.
You philistine might wonder “Wait, how does a car made out of ham move?”. Well, it’s haunted, duh!
@made of wince: In the sense that when Ian is over her, Toby pretends he’s Dwayne the Rock Johnson
“the fact that it’s haunted by three of them implies that we know a lot less about matters of the spirit than we may think.”
More like we know a lot less about matters of ham than we think.