Post Content

Mary Worth, 7/30/24

A recurring question that arises in the increasingly Wilbur-focused era of Mary Worth we find ourselves in is: are we getting so much Wilbur because we’re expected to like and support him, or are we being repeatedly shown his worst humiliations, in order to create a strip that is nothing more than his personal hell? I’ve had my doubts, but today’s strip, in which Wilbur tells an incredulous fish that he communicated with another dead fish in a dream, and then we smash cut to Wilbur’s ex, whom Wilbur named the dead fish after, in the midst of an extremely erotic canoodle with her handsome boyfriend, certainly seems to point in one direction fairly strongly.

Blondie, 7/30/24

Blondie absolutely loves a “what’s a universal, non-controversial cultural touchstone of the moment we can do extremely lazy jokes about,” and obviously the Olympics are the pinnacle of that sort of thing, with the added advantage that they last for weeks. Yesterday we had a mildly funny joke about Dagwood getting in trouble for streaming the Olympics on his phone during a work meeting, but I’m actually kind of appalled by today’s strip, which seems to imply that Olympic runners have their performance scored by judges rather than simply being timed to see who finishes the event the fastest.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/30/24

I love it when a work of art sparks a conversation, raising not one but multiple questions about its characters and its world. For instance, today’s Snuffy Smith has me asking “Doesn’t ‘busking’ usually happen on a sidewalk in a big city? Why is Jughaid doing it out in the middle of an open field somewhere” but also “Doesn’t Jughaid wear that stupid hat all the time? Does Ol’ Bullet repeatedly attack him when he does, and if so why don’t we get to see it more often?”

Shoe, 7/30/24

Ha ha! A laugh track, get it? Because his political promises are laughable! Good one! Say, does anyone involved in the creation of Shoe know what a “website” is and how one works? Like have they ever used the internet, at all?

Post Content

Hagar the Horrible, 7/24/24

You might think this strip is about Eddie being a simple man who has never had the realities of sexual reproduction explained to him, but you have to remember that he lives in a world of enchantment where mermaids are real, so who’s to say if fairy dust and magic spells aren’t how babies are made in his universe? He’d better hope they are, anyway, because if he ever figures out how to get his dick into one of the aforementioned mermaids, he’s going to sire chimeric abominations the likes of which these simple Vikings have never seen.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/24/24

This strip got me to Google “can frogs survive in soapy water” but all the links are to threads on websites like frogforums dot net or the r/Amphibian subreddit with titles like “Froggy 911!! Help, please!! My two year old put dish soap into the frog tank!” and I got sad and couldn’t bring myself to click on them. So, uh, those three frogs are just fine, probably! Healthy and living their best lives!

Dustin, 7/24/24

Hey, have you guys heard that people used to make phone calls as their primary means of communication, but now in many situations find it easier and more convenient to text? Wild stuff.

Post Content

Hagar the Horrible, 7/21/24

One of the many smarter-than-me commenters on this site pointed out that it’s actually pretty grim that Hagar and Eddie are the only recurring characters in Hagar’s war band. One assumes that the others are all killed off and replaced over time — sometimes one by one, and sometimes all at once in the disastrous encounters that presumably lead to the occasional desert island strips. Anyway, today’s strip is a good reminder that whenever your new boss tells you that their workplace is “like a big family,” you are definitely walking into the most dysfunctional company you’ve ever seen, but at least these days it’s usually not going to literally kill you.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/21/24

A combination of neoliberal ideology and deep-rooted Calvinism has made the modern United States a place uniquely obsessed with constant productivity. In such environments, only “holy fools” — like, say, the weirdly ossified early 20th century fake hillbilly stereotypes in a syndicated legacy newspaper strip — are free to proclaim that maybe laziness is good, actually, and getting things done isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/21/24

Sorry to find two funny things in a strip about an abusive father who beat his son so badly he needed surgery, but two very funny things in this strip are (a) Buck being completely flummoxed as to why two best friends with a love of old-timey-style comedy, one of whom is tall and thin and the other short and round, would refer to themselves as “Shorty and the Beanpole,” and (b) Rex being like “We all need to do our part. My part is fixing up the broken meat; minds and feelings are completely foreign to me and frankly somebody else’s problem.”