Post Content

Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody! Which of today’s valentine-themed comics is the most depressing?

Blondie, 2/14/19

Is it Blondie, where the title character is an eternally youthful bombshell yet still needs to go to increasingly grotesque lengths to elicit the sexual interest of her food-obsessed husband?

Beetle Bailey, 2/14/19

Is it Beetle Bailey, where the title character has fallen asleep and his girlfriend is using him like a sex doll, but for feelings? (I somehow find the glass on the end table here particularly evocative; I assume Beetle, committed to never ingesting any stimulant that might impede his ability to doze off, took a few sips of room temperature tap water before slipping into blessed unconsciousness mid-date.)

Mark Trail, 2/14/19

Is it Mark Trail, where Cherry wistfully remembers the time where there were romance comic strips, the sort of comic strips where a character might get her emotional and physical needs met once in a while, you know?

Six Chix, 2/14/19

Is it Six Chix, where this lady is on a date with a sock puppet? You know, the extremely normal and relatable situation where you meet someone and they turn out to be a human arm inside a sock that has eyes sewed on it?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/14/19

In fact, to find true emotional fulfillment in today’s strips, we need to go beyond the world of traditional romantic attachment. For instance, imagine that you’re a ham radio operator who lives out in a desolate wasteland. Not a lot of opportunities to go on dates out there, of course. But now imagine a plane full of people suddenly arrives, their cell phones useless. They need to be able to communicate with the outside world somehow … using some kind of radio apparatus … perhaps one operated on an amateur basis. This is it. The moment has arrived. Other people dream about the day they stand at the altar, before their family and friends, to be united forever with their beloved. You’ve been dreaming about this.

Post Content

Panel from Slylock Fox, 2/10/19

I’m not even going to go into the insane “solution” to this puzzle — Smitty went in and “stole every item he had purchased earlier”? So it’s like he’s helping himself to a two-for-one deal? Also polygraphy is bunk, but not even its defenders would claim that it’s precise enough to indicate unambiguous truth-telling when someone is giving a narrowly tailored answer that is technically true but hides a larger lie? — and instead just want to point out Buford Bull is a well-known member of Slylock’s rogues gallery. How do we know that Buford isn’t making a false accusation of theft as part of some kind of insurance scam? It’s clear how Slylock and the animal regime he represents assesses a criminal vs. criminal dispute: when in doubt, blame H. sapiens.

Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/10/19

There’s a lot to unpack in today’s Snuffy Smith throwaway panels, guys. At first, it seems that Snuffy is saying his wedding to Loweezy was a “shotgun wedding,” a term typically used to denote a scenario in which a young woman has become pregnant out of wedlock, and her family uses the threat of violence to coerce her paramour to legally bind himself to her and their future child. This seems to reveal some unexpected details about the world-building of the strip: it implies that Loweezy and Snuffy were unmarried lovers relatively recently, for instance, seeing as Tater is still a pre-verbal toddler. And what about Jughaid, a nephew of one or the other of them? He’s got to be at least 9 or 10 years old: does that mean that he was already dependent on Snuffy or Loweezy before they got together? Or was the orphaned lad put into their care specifically because they had formed a stable home?

But here’s an important detail: what brings up memories of Snuffy’s wedding day isn’t the sight of shotguns, but the sound of them — lots of them. That doesn’t sound like the somewhat ritualized coercion that can precede weddings brought about by unplanned pregnancies; it sounds a lot more like an ambush. In cultures where the authority of a central state is tenuous, kinship is all important, and blood feuds last generations, from the Appalachians to Afghanistan, weddings and other family gatherings are often a site of violence. Maybe Jughaid’s parents died that day, and by Holler Law he was subsequently adopted by the surviving couple.

Panels from Beetle Bailey, 2/10/19

Ha ha, it’s funny because years in the army have left Sarge more comfortable killing his fellow human beings than interacting with them in social situations!

Post Content

Dick Tracy, 2/4/19

Sam Catchem is canonically Jewish, but I guess he’s finally decided to address the “elephant in the room,” which is that he dresses like a leprechaun for inscrutable reasons; I assume he called out “Top of the morning!” in his most over-the-top Lucky-Charms-commercial-style Irish accent as he walked into the office. Dick is ignoring him, of course, being thoroughly engrossed in the police blotter, relaxing while reading about completely normal and not at all suspicious crimes like uniform larceny and [squints] something snowman related.

Beetle Bailey, 2/4/19

Hey, remember when Beetle invaded Sarge’s dream and it was uncanny and surreal? Well, I guess we know who’s more avant-garde when it comes to extremely low rent legacy newspaper comics Inceptioning.

Pajama Diaries, 2/4/19

Are you tired of all the gross Marvin comics about babies peeing? Here, enjoy this gross Pajama Diaries comic about adults not peeing.