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51

Cranky Wednesday

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Hi and Lois, 3/18/26

Look, we’re all adults here. Well, maybe some of you are weird kids with grown-up taste in ironic internet websites, I don’t know, but my point is, let’s ignore Trixie’s insipid heliocentric rambling and turn our eyes to the fun little domestic drama in panel one. Check out how beaten down and defeated Hi looks; that’s a man who has passive-aggressively talked about high energy bills for weeks even as time slips further and further into air conditioning season; and rather than be gracious after he’s given in, Lois is doing a little pantomime of concern: “Oh, but can we afford it, Hi? Will we need to dip into the children’s college fund, in order to keep the temperature in here below 80 degrees?” My own natural thrift puts me tentatively on Hi’s side here, but they could be taking other steps, like following Trixie’s lead and pricing solar panels, or at least taking off their sweaters.

Judge Parker, 3/18/26

One of my least favorite little narrative devices is when some character makes a daring and self-destructive move in order to achieve some goal, and then comes out on top against all odds, but when he does, announces that he understands he shouldn’t have done it in the first place. This happens more often than you’d think, and it’s especially annoying in cases like this, when Randy is like “I’m a bad person! I’ve suffered nothing for my choices and actually had a pretty cool time getting broken out of prison by my hot, murderous wife, but I just want to apologize for my wrongs! Probably my daughter doesn’t love me anymore, right? Whatever, she’s someone else’s problem now, which, uh, I again acknowledge I should feel bad about.”

Luann, 3/18/26

A thing about the comic strip Luann is that sometimes you’ll get a whole week’s worth of strips where one character just passive-aggressively talks shit about another character within earshot of them. And the shit-talker is the one you’re supposed to be sympathetic towards. It’s wild stuff!

168

MidMarch follies

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Dick Tracy, 3/17/26

Welp, the huge prison riot/jailbreak in Dick Tracy is winding down, with a lot of bad guys on the loose but the authorities regaining control of the facility. Now, there are lots of narrative reasons why we might start with some guards capturing prisoners in an open field, including one guy kneeling with a gun pointed at the back of his head, and then smash cut to a bunch of bodies under sheets in a similar looking field. But as your Comics Curmudgeon who remembers the old days of cartoonish Dick Tracy ultraviolence, I’m kind of required to guess at the grimmest possible narrative reason.

Hi and Lois, 3/17/26

Man, there are a lot of holidays I’m glad we’re not going to see Thirsty celebrating, I’m just gonna leave it at that!

Mary Worth, 3/17/26

“Yes, we certainly do, Toby! Say, how are your parrots doing? You know, the ones that shit everywhere and almost drove you to divorce?”

155

Cyber Monday

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Lockhorns, 3/16/26

Every once in a while the Lockhorns will deviate from their usual laser focus on Leroy and Loretta’s mutual antagonism and just do a “Ha ha, Leroy is a doofus” panel, and honestly I don’t care for it. At least this one includes Loretta looking at her husband with an expression of absolute despair, as she reflects upon exactly what type of man she chose to spend the balance of her adult life with.

Archie, 3/16/26

I was a pretty obsessive Archie Comics reader as a kid, but nevertheless there are bits of Archieverse lore that I’ve learned from the twentysomething-year-old newspaper strips currently in reruns. I don’t think I knew that Reggie was the editor of the student newspaper, for instance, nor that he was that classic type of late ’90s/early ’00s tech guy who had the skills to create an interactive website in the Web 1.0 era but was also obsessive about online privacy.

Crankshaft, 3/16/26

“Anyway, the one week I did it on the computer was last week, and it turns out computers are amazing. I’m definitely selling this drawing board, for a lot of money!”