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Between Friends, 1/29/25

Really kind of depressing that in every panel where we see the Blonde Between Friends Friend’s face here, her facial expression is nothing but grim resignation. She’s not actually getting any joy out of keeping this egg tray. She’s not happy the world is like this, or that she’s like this. But she’s not getting rid of the tray!

Blondie, 1/29/25

I guess it would’ve been a little on the nose for Blondie’s flashback to show her and Dagwood actually saying the phrase in question in their vows, but it’s a little unnerving to instead see them just staring ahead and simultaneously visualizing a big sandwich while the minister blabs on about what Jesus wants their relationship to be like or whatever. Dagwood is doing this because he’s just thinking about big sandwiches all the time, but Blondie … well, I’m not sure what’s going on with her, whether she’s trying to psych herself up to get married to a Big Sandwich Guy or if she’s thinking about spending the wedding night making big sandwiches to feed to him, sexually, or what. Anyway, this wedding sadly cannot hold a candle to the time Dagwood’s parents got him hepped up on ether and tried to force him to marry Blondie’s roommate.

Alice, 1/29/25

Oh, also, Alice has gotten dumped by her boyfriend, a grown man (?) who dresses like a comical child, which has to be pretty embarrassing for her. This is a lady who’s been kidnapped by aliens and flirted at by air conditioners but I have to think she sees this as a low even for the context of the strip.

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Marvin, 1/15/25

The thing about writing a blog post a day, every day, forever, is that you can definitely find yourself caught in some ruts, which makes me sympathetic to the ruts that comics creators, who have to write a comic a day, every day, forever, find themselves in, even when one of my ruts is making fun of their ruts. I’ve been making fun of poop and piss jokes in Marvin for 18 years now — a lifetime, really — and the last time I brought it up, a faithful commentator gently pointed out that actually Marvin has moved away from that material of late. And they’re right! I should be giving this strip credit for the rich veins of comic possibilities it’s been mining beyond the excretory. Pretty sure no other strip is working in the “what if a dog and a baby who lived together really disliked each other, just honestly hated each other’s guts and were always going out of their way to antagonize one another” space, and honestly I respect it.

Alice, 1/15/25

Speaking of my long blogging career, I’ve been talking about the comic strip Alice on this blog for 10 months now, which is long enough for me to indignantly assume the role of “keeper of the Alice lore.” And as all real Alice-heads know, the Aliceverse already has an alien species that visits our planet in pill-shaped spacecraft. And now you’re trying to tell me that there’s some whole different kind of aliens with more conventional-looking flying saucers? Sorry, I’m not buying it.

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Mark Trail, 12/18/24

Mark Trail can of course never be an anti-hunting strip per se, but it has always adhered to a strict moral code when it comes to the sport: for instance, it’s highly dishonorable to stage a canned hunt of a little girl’s pet deer (which is named “Lucky”) as part of an ill-conceived plan to run for governor, or to buy a rare white lion specifically to hunt it. But this is Nu-Look Mark Trail and we need to move on to modern hunting crimes, like hunting a deer that’s famous on TikTok specifically to gain clout on TikTok. They don’t say TikTok, but people definitely mean TikTok when they say “social media” generically right now, the same way everyone who said “social media” generically in 2011 meant Facebook and everyone who said it in 2018 meant Twitter. Anyway, will vengeful TikTok teens punch Cherry’s sister’s bad boyfriend out before Mark can get to him? More on this story as it develops.

Curtis, 12/18/24

The Elon Musk-related punchline to this strip is neither here nor there, but I actually think it’s very funny that for three panels we get Greg Wilkins explaining to his tween son, in earnest detail, what a snow globe is and how it works. I guess the joke is that the kids today with their cell phones and Tesla cars (?) don’t know what a snow globe is or how it works and have to have all that explained to them, but I’m actually pretty sure that most of them are at least passingly familiar.

Alice, 12/18/24

This joke is actually — well, “good” is too strong a word, but it’s definitely passable. The only problem is that it should involve a child looking at a huge bookcase packed with books, not a small end table with six relatively slim volumes stacked atop it. But I guess we should respect the fact that Alice never wavers from its commitment to always take place in a mysterious and mostly featureless void.