Post Content

Blondie, 1/17/24

I gotta say, “In honor of Kid Inventors Day, I created an alarm clock app that doesn’t work” is probably the funniest sentence I’ve ever read in Blondie, and I’ve read Blondie more or less every day for the bulk of my life. Anyway, it’s all downhill from there, and I honestly wouldn’t bother reading the rest of the strip if I were you.

Dennis the Menace, 1/17/24

Dennis has learned to draw a distinction between basic reactive pleasures and the higher-level emotion of pride, which derives from pleasing other people he respects or society at large. Not sure if that’s menacing or not. Guess it probably is, given today’s evidence of how he’s making sense of his own complex emotional landscape.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/17/24

Anyone else accidentally read that final word balloon as “th’ noose awaits !!” at first? No? Just me? Just me fantasizing that King Features is about to end its longest running strip in the most shocking way imaginable?

Beetle Bailey, 1/17/24

Wow, Beetle Bailey has portrayed an actually relatively recent trend — movie theaters with big reclining seats! Don’t worry, nobody on the Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC staff has actually been to one of these places, but a friend of theirs had it described to them by one of their grandkids, so they’re pretty sure they have a good idea of what one probably looks like.

Post Content

Beetle Bailey, 1/14/24

I know I spend more time thinking about the logistics of what happens in-universe in newspaper comic strips than just about anyone else, up to and including the people who write and draw them, but I gotta say I find today’s strip kind of baffling. Under what circumstances would Cookie, who has to serve hundreds of people multiple meals a day, be inconvenienced by a freezer full of easy to prepare and tasty meatballs and find himself wanting to get rid of them somehow? My guess is that the original joke was something about forcing Sarge to eat his literal garbage, but some voice of editorial sanity decided that was too gross even for this strip.

Hagar the Horrible, 1/14/24

Today’s throwaway panels actually strike me as a genuine narrative innovation in comics, showing you what happens before and after the main action of the strip. And they definitely change the vibe of things: sure, we can all get a good laugh out of Hagar finally going to jail for one of his many crimes, but it is kind of sad knowing that his wife, to whom he promised a nice meal that he planned to pay for with the proceeds of his plunder, is gradually realizing that some misfortune has befallen him and is increasingly bereft about it.

Family Circus, 1/14/24

Remember, folks: the distinctive stench of the Keane family lingers on everything they touch. It’s extremely vivid.

Post Content

Blondie, 12/21/23

Huh, well, I guess “Josh uses his dumb blog about comic strips to talk about the infancy narratives in the Bible” year had to come around eventually, and it looks like 2023 is the year! Anyway, a fun fact about the infancy narratives, plural, is that there are two of them, one in the Gospel of Matthew and the other the Gospel of Luke (John and Mark just jump right into Jesus’s baptism and ministry), and they are almost completely different from one another, beyond the basics of the virgin birth happening in Bethlehem. Matthew (and only Matthew) has the killing of the innocents, and the flight into Egypt; there’s no indication in that story that Mary and Joseph aren’t already living in Bethlehem, and it’s explicitly stated that they end up in Nazareth to get away from King Herod’s son and successor. Only Luke has the stuff about Mary and John the Baptist’s mother being cousins, and only Luke has the story about the census bringing the family to Bethlehem and Mary giving birth; afterwards they go home (to Nazareth, in this version) and there’s no mention of Egypt at all.

But because both these stories were canonized, most people have an idea of the infancy narrative that basically just mashes all these incidents together into one sequence. Even the colorful characters that appear together in manger scenes are actually from two completely different stories: the wise men, guided by a star, are in Matthew, while the shepherds, summoned by an angel, are in Luke. This is a long way to get to my point, which is: A GPS joke would’ve worked better with wise men rather than shepherds, right? Like, I guess technically they’re coming in from the fields, but Bethlehem was a pretty small city back then, and the wise men are coming from a completely different country. Frankly, I think whoever wrote this joke is kind of mixing the shepherds and the wise men up, so — and here’s a sentence that I’m frankly proud could be found nowhere else but on Josh reads dot com, your source for newspaper comics and musings on the textual history of Christianity — I firmly believe that today’s Blondie really demonstrates the complex ways that these two contradictory narratives have become a single story in our collective mindset.

Beetle Bailey, 12/21/23

Beetle Bailey is frankly almost as old as the Bible, and its devoted readers have internalized its logic as dogma, so I guess it can get away with doing a strip where Beetle’s like “What if it’s not sunny tomorrow” and then Sarge says “Then I’m going to beat you into unconsciousness.” Doesn’t make it right, though! Doesn’t make it right.

Hi and Lois, 12/21/23

This year, Hi and Lois is letting us know about the real meaning of Christmas: being stiffed by retailers and your boss, and then forcing yourself to attend social obligations with people you hate. I do think that Hi and Thirsty genuinely like each other, or at least have trauma bonded at their job, but you have to admit it’d be pretty funny if the whole gang were saying all this while heading over to the Thurstons, their neighbors and also two of the few people we ever see them interacting with socially.

Pluggers, 12/21/23

If a plugger slips and falls on the ice, and no one is around to hear, because he’s alienated his family with his unhinged Facebook posts and his neighbors with his extremely bad vibes, and then he slowly freezes to death out there, taking his final breath on Christmas morning, vaguely hearing happier people laughing and enjoying each other’s company … wait, what was the question again? Anyway, pluggers, please salt your front walk, I’m begging you.