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Blondie, 10/26/24

Look, clearly I’m not as young as I was when I launched this blog back in 2004, and if I had a chance to tell that 29-year-old what what aging would be like, I would say that it really fucks with your sense of time: things that you think of as happening just the other day may, in fact, have happened literally years ago. But writing about the legacy comics definitely helps “keep you young,” not in the sense that comics are a medium for children or anything, but rather in the sense that the legacy strips are all churned out by old guys, so you get a lot of cautionary examples of how not to be a clueless old guy. For instance, no matter how novel something seems to me, I would do a little research about it before committing to print the declaration that it constitutes a “hot craze.” Did you know that Starbucks has been selling pumpkin spice lattes since 2003? That they are, in fact, even older than this blog? I’m just saying. Making wry commentary about Mary Worth may have once been a hot craze, but it is no longer, and neither, I regret to inform both Elmo and Dagwood, is pumpkin spice.

Beetle Bailey, 10/26/24

I actually really like how happy all the officers are in the first panel. It would’ve been easy, given the joke, to make them sullen or angry that their team is losing, and expressing their rage in a nonstop stream of obscenities. But they’re havng a great time! They’re exuberant swearers! That changes the whole dynamic.

Hi and Lois, 10/26/24

OK, so earlier this week I made my occasional reference to the occasional colorist mistakes that you see in the comics, but this is definitely the funniest one yet. Just imagine some unfortunate, underpaid soul, possibly working in a country where baseball is not a well known pastime, squinting at Ditto’s hat and thinking, “So … ‘Sox’? That’s short for Red Sox, right? Great, I have this one covered.”

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Mary Worth, 10/14/24

“You’re right, Mary! I made a decision meant to avoid pain of the type I had suffered before, but now, under your careful guidance, I’ve learned that was a mistake. I’m ready to marry yet another emotionally unavailable workaholic! I’m ready to be a widow twice over! Thank you, Mary, for breaking my spirit!”

Intelligent Life, 10/14/24

Sure, this comic strip conflates the zoot suit, popularized by African- and Mexican-Americans in the 1940s, with a suit cut in a totally different style that was worn by the Joker as portrayed by Cesar Romero, a man of Spanish and Cuban descent, which isn’t great. On the other hand, it got me to do a little Googling and discover that for a mere $950 you could be the owner of a genuine “Jokers Wild Purple” zoot suit, so who’s to say if it’s good or bad?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/14/24

I kind of love Silas’s emotion affect in the second panel here: he’s both pleased and a little puzzled. Have Snuffy and his fellow primitive denizens of Hootin’ Holler finally developed the ability to understand and even sympathize with the emotions of others? Silas had never thought he’d see the day, but his store is the lone outpost of globally-scaled free-market capitalism in this otherwise backwards region, and he’s ready to profit off this local development with the sale of some of the sympathy cards he ordered a while back, just in case.

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Blondie, 10/9/24

I have to admit that, not being an artist myself, I’m sometimes a little hesitant to criticize comics art, especially when it comes to making sweeping statements about how exactly that art was produced when I realize I don’t have that much insider knowledge. I am, however, reasonably sure that, to create two panels of an open book just kind of sitting on the couch and resting (?) on a person’s thigh, the normal book-reading configuration we all know and love, one or more pieces of clip art may have been involved. It’s too bad, too, because it really distracts from a killer joke where a dad asks his daughter what she’s reading and she tells him but then it turns out she’s lied about it, I guess, and has actually tucked a phone inside her book, the normal phone-using configuration we all know and love.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/9/24

I like Lukey and Snuff’s shock and horror in the second panel and refusal to play along with the Sheriff’s jape in the third. Hootin’ Holler may be a notorious haven for criminals of various types, but they draw the line at stealing horses, possibly because it seems very ambitious and who wants to put in that kind of effort.