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Hi and Lois, 5/25/19

The best part about today’s strip is the expressions of pure delight on Ditto and his friend’s faces in panel two. This clearly isn’t the first time Thirsty has overshared the contours of marital woes with them, but now things have escalated to the point where he’s been thrown out of the house, and so they’re settling in for some tales of truly outrageous tales of domestic depravity.

Beetle Bailey, 5/25/19

Fun fact! “Knasen,” which, depending on which possibly incorrect auto-translation service you use, is Swedish either for “knees” or “the knot,” is what Beetle Bailey is called in Sweden. And since we all know that Swedish Beetle Bailey is just straight-up porn, that means that Plato has been spending his off hours getting aroused reading about the adventures of Scandinavian alternate universe versions of him and his friends, who get to actually have sex.

Not fun at all fact! Sarge often viciously beats up Beetle in public for the slightest irritation, and nobody ever stops him.

Dustin, 5/25/19

Hey kids, remember Dustin, the comic that doesn’t really know what Twitter is or how it works? Well, here’s some exciting news: it has even less of a grasp on Instagram.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/19/19

Lots of today’s comics are doing special strips for Red Nose Day, but I’m only going mention one because otherwise it’d get pretty repetitive, and that one is going to be Snuffy Smith, because the point of Red Nose Day is to raise money to combat childhood poverty and there are few clearer examples in the comics of children living in poverty than the (literally, desperately) poor children of Hootin’ Holler.

Beetle Bailey, 5/19/19

You have to respect how acutely aware Miss Buxley is of the progress of General Haltrack’s sundowning: she knows that his “I’ve been in the army [X] years” diatribe is good for a solid 10 minutes where she won’t have to do anything but stand there and nod politely, and she’s going get it out of him even if she has to wave the calendar in his fact to start it. You also have to respect the comics colorist who made Halftrack a white-haired old man in the first flashback panel, then realized in the next panel that he was supposed to be young, but didn’t bother going back to fix their earlier mistake.

Family Circus, 5/19/19

Sure, this is a cute comic about how Sam the dog fetches Big Daddy Keane’s slippers and greets Grandma at the door and, uh, takes care of PJ when all the adults are ignoring him or gone altogether, but let’s not neglect Billy’s look of creeping panic in the center panel here. He feels like he has to denigrate Sam’s skills because he’s not good at anything and he’s never going be good at anything, and he knows it.

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Pajama Diaries, 4/26/19

I’ve got a solid five months of reading the Pajama Diaries under my belt, and I feel comfortable in saying that I pretty much know what its lane is, and that lane is “anxiety-ridden parents of teens try to enjoy life but can’t, really, because of anxiety.” Their lane is not “middle aged suburban lowkey kinksters.” That lane is occupied by Arlo and Janis. Sorry, Pajama Diaries, I’m going to have to request that you stay in your lane.

(Also, the strip’s Wikipedia page claims that it takes place in Ohio, so I’m going to assume that “safety word” is a regional variation for “safe word,” like how my cousins in Columbus thought “sneakers” was the dumbest word they ever heard but said “tennies” like it was totally normal.)

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/26/19

I like Sarah’s pensive look in the first panel here. She seems to be thinking, “Wait, I know I have amnesia, but I have this feeling that I’m the one who’s supposed to be getting free stuff from some person of inexplicable means. This doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel right at all.”

Hagar the Horrible, 4/26/19

Ha ha, it’s funny because Lucky Eddie’s uncle was injured, leaving hin unable to continue the violent means by which he gained sustenance in his medieval environment. Probably he’s going to die in poverty, and soon!

Beetle Bailey, 4/26/19

Ha ha, it’s funny because Beetle got mauled by a bunch of raccoons! There’s a good chance he has rabies now?