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Blondie, 2/21/24

I am coming around to the opinion that the primary value of the syndicated newspaper comic strip Blondie is to provide anthropological insights into the mind and culture of the American middle-class boomer. Take today’s strip, for example: a real problem is identified (in this case, a formerly crucial communications channel becoming mostly a medium for delivering scams and garbage) but the issue is seen primarly as a personal affront to the viewpoint character imposed on him by whatever service worker he happens to interact with. Truly there is no clearer icon of “How can this be happening to Me, the protagonist of reality” than Dagwood impotently waving his fist in the air in panel three!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/21/24

That “feller” is almost certainly a self-insert of current Snuffy Smith artist John Rose, which means that Snuffy just missed a chance to have his own Creator craft a universe that he ruled like a king, for a mere $50! When he cast his critical eye across the canvas, did he not recognize his own lumpy nature in the scene’s imperfections?

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Hi and Lois, 2/6/24

God, this one is super bleak. Lois has convinced herself that, sure, things are tight and they can’t afford to order pizza very often even though the kids are always whining for it, but what if she just learned how to make it herself? And what if the kids learned to love that even more than the crap from Dominio’s? “Mom’s homemade pizza,” they’d call it, and it would be a fond childhood memory they’d carry with them the rest of their lives, something they looked forward to, not a marker of her and Hi’s failure to provide them with what they really wanted. This fantasy lasts mere seconds into the children’s’ actual encounter with her malformed, fucked-up pizza, and look at her face — she is devastated.

Family Circus, 2/6/24

Jeffy, meanwhile, has been abandoned by his parents and is being forced to clean the house himself even though he’s a toddler, and he’s doing fine. “Noooo, Jeffy, you’re screwing this up, do you even know what cleaning is” Dolly whines in the background, but Jeffy doesn’t care. Look at that face. Cool competence and determination. He’s thriving for the first time in his short, dumb life.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/6/24

I often think that contemporary middle- and upper-class Americans create a culture of child safety that’s unprecedented in history, with children monitored at all times well into their teenage years and not given space to explore or gain useful life skills in ways that will be really damaging down the road. But then I see strips like this and think maybe there’s something to it.

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Hagar the Horrible, 2/3/24

Man, I remember when poetry was orally transmitted, when anyone could get in front of the assembly and fire off some verses that they had memorized about the contention of the gods or the glorious battles fought by our fathers or our fathers’ fathers in the south. But then, our fathers fathers’ brought back writing from the south, along with big ideas about how the King shouldn’t just be the chief of chiefs but at the top of the heap and in command of all, and now you need his permission just to be a poet, and you have to write all your poetry down on paper. This place is getting to be a drag, man. You wanna go to Greenland? I hear Greenland is still cool. Got a lot of breathing room out there.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/3/24

I applaud today’s Snuffy Smith for acknowledging that generation gap discourse is eternal and ongoing rather than doing the “kids today would rather look at the phone on their comfortable couch instead of playing kick the can in the street and getting run over by a car” bit, but I do want to recognize that Snuffy’s father was canonically in a Rip Van Winkle-style state of suspended animation for decades. He literally doesn’t understand the current generation! He’s a man out of time, unmoored from the world he thought he knew!

Hi and Lois, 2/3/24

Ha ha, it’s funny because Thirsty is going to die of carbon monoxide poisoning in that tent! Don’t worry, it will be very peaceful for him, because he’s quite drunk.