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Hi and Lois, 5/12/24

The “joke” of today’s strip is that the Flagston children have announced that their mother now has to share Mother’s Day with their father, and that their father will not be receiving any recognition on Father’s Day next month at all. And the adults are just sitting there smiling about it! Have some self-respect and stand up for yourselves, you two! I know you’re outnumbered by the children, but one of them is a literal baby, I think you still have the advantage.

Beetle Bailey, 5/12/24

Beetle Bailey fans, of course, delight at strips where Sarge uses kinetic violence to reduce Beetle to an unrecognizable and mangled pile of flesh, but as today’s strip demonstrates, they would be horrified at the thought of Sarge poisoning Beetle and need to be reassured that he is being sprayed with only “toxin-free” chemicals. In this sense, and in this sense only, Beetle Bailey is very much like modern combat, as governed by the 1925 Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare.

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Beetle Bailey, 5/10/24

The thing I like about this strip is how numb Sarge looks in the second panel. He scarfed down two plates full of burgers and fries and guzzled two waters in just a few minutes, and for what? Does he feel any better? Does he feel sated? Will he ever feel sated? He didn’t even wash his hands. He ate dinner with dirty hands, and he didn’t even enjoy it.

Mary Worth, 5/10/24

Seeing a disheveled Wilbur gesticulating with a sandwich and talking about “turning off the world” is genuinely chilling. Did he use his Wilbur-Man powers to transform the whole universe outside of his apartment into an endless void? Hopefully his abilities allow him to create as well as destroy, or that’s the last sandwich he’ll ever eat. Eternal peace … but at what cost?

Blondie, 5/10/24

Somebody in the Blondie supply chain has been having real fun with bold and chunky color gradients lately, and I just want to say: I see you, and I appreciate you.

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Hi and Lois, 5/5/24

I guess the point of this strip (to the extent that any given Hi and Lois comic can be said to have a “point”) is to shore up the Walker-Browne brand and remind American that the Camp Swampy gang and the Flagstons’ suburban hellscape coexist in a single universe of shared IP. Personally, I’m more intrigued by the comic book time effects: when the strip launched in 1954, Lois presumably had a birth date that would’ve put her roughly in the same demographic as her grandmother in the middle second row panel here. But what really makes this for me is Ditto looking cruelly at the cookie jar and whispering that delightfully batshit sentence at it, simultaneously erotic and threatening, the sort of thing that, if your parents overheard you saying it, they’d repeat it to every romantic partner you ever brought home for the rest of your life, to your mounting distress.

Beetle Bailey, 5/5/24

Elsehwere in the FlagstBaileyVerse, Killer is making a dating app profile! As much fun as the main body of the strip makes spinning a web of lies in an attempt to attract some hapless young woman seem, I must point your attention to Killer’s look of beaten-down resignation in the first throwaway panel. Being the most oversexed soldier in your unit is a job, and Killer is determined to be good at it, but like every job it wears on you after a while.

Mary Worth, 5/5/24

Maybe Killer doesn’t need to put so much work into this, though. After all, if the person you meet on the apps turns out to not be for you, you can always just smooch the nearest attractive service worker to fulfill your natural romantic needs! (Just kidding, if Killer tried this today he would immediately be arrested, because of woke.)