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Hi and Lois, 11/11/26

As I like to occasionally remind my readers, thanks to comic strip time you have been reading Hi and Lois and following the non-adventures of Trixie Flagston for decades, and all the running bits involving her seem like old hat to you, but Trixie is literally a baby, less than a year old, and from her perspective she’s experiencing many of the things you see happening to her for the very first time. That’s probably why she looks so gobsmacked here. Maybe this is the first time in her entire life (i.e., the last several months) that it’s ever rained two days in a row! Where’s her friend Sunbeam? Is he dead?

Pluggers, 11/11/26

Happy Veterans Day! Do you carry a metal water bottle with you, so you can stay hydrated while saving money and cutting down on unnecessary litter? Well, I hope you enjoy stealing valor, asshole.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/10/26

There’s a whole social media trend of young people posting images of food service on airlines in the days of yore accompanied by captions like “RETVRN” or “THIS IS WHAT THEY TOOK FROM YOU,” and I hate to point out that these are mostly (1) ads for (2) first class service in an age when (3) even coach class was much more expensive than it is today, accounting for inflation. It seems that this kind of rhetoric has filtered down to the young people of Hootin’ Holler who are (both literally and, in terms of their ability to afford air travel, figuratively) miles away from the nearest airport, so I’m here to tell them: you still get snacks! They’re still handing out little bags of pretzels or whatever. Maybe not on Frontier or Spirit, but Spirit went out of business, so maybe handing out snacks is here to stay. Keep hope alive!

Dick Tracy, 11/10/26

Dick and his partner standing at crazy dutch angles relative to everyone else, somehow, while odd shadows falling from no obvious light source make everything very dramatic? Mysterious femme fatale emerging from an incongruous corner doorway? I do not regret to inform you that Dick Tracy has, to use a technical term, gone “full-on German Expressionist.”

Hi and Lois, 11/10/26

Wow, Thirsty gets a new pillow every year? I’m gonna say it: that seems like it’s pretty often. More often than I get one, for sure. Seems like something you’d only do for someone who’s doing horrible stuff to/on/near his pillows, and now I wanna know what.

Mary Worth, 11/10/26

“It’s because I keep spreading vicious false rumors about people and it alienates everyone! Uh, I mean, about other people, people not in this room, that’s it.”

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Herb and Jamaal, 11/9/26

Is it, Herb? Is it? Is that what watching for a single kernel of corn to pop is like? It’s like waiting for the next news cycle to occur? Is that right? Is it really?

Hagar the Horrible, 11/9/26

There were two small Norse settlements on the western and southwestern coasts of Greenland in the early middle ages, but they drop out of written historical records by the mid 1300s and archaeological evidence shows that they had ceased to exist by the mid 1400s, and there is a lively and vigorous debate as to what exactly happened. Did the lowered temperatures of the so-called Little Ice Age make it impossible for the Norse to maintain their agricultural way of life? Were they overrun or displaced by the Inuit, who were better adapted to the Arctic and who arrived from the north around the time the Norse settlement declined? Did Europeans find cheaper sources of ivory, which had been the Greenlanders’ main export, making it impossible to import wood and iron and leaving the colonies economically unsustainable? The answer is probably some combination of the three, and we have to imagine that the decline might have produced a scene very much like this, in which, in the absence of native firewood, the Greenlanders burned their own infrastructure, built from materials imported at great expense, to keep away the bitter cold for at least one more night.

Alice, 11/9/26

Hey, did one of you get an email from Alice and not reply to it? Uncool, man! She’s honestly kind of bummed about it.