Post Content

Between Friends, 5/24/24

For my sins, I must occasionally fulfill my oath and keep you up to date on the Between Friends gals, so: the dark-haired Between Friends gal is working temporarily in Paris, and has a flirty relationship with her boss Benoit and a weirdly antagonistic relationship with her coworker Louise, and today we’re finding out why. I bring all this up because, maybe I’m crazy, but I find the phrasing in panel two here very weird? Like: do I think your wife’s sister’s daughter is your niece? Absolutely. Would I still call her your niece if you and your wife got divorced? More of a grey area, but I still think of my dad’s brother’s ex-wife, who I’m friends with on Facebook, as my aunt, and they’ve been divorced for 20 years, so it’s not unreasonable. But the formulation “his niece on his ex-wife’s side!” just seems deranged and unnatural to me. Do we have nieces and nephews on … sides? I am imagining her co-worker here saying it in a really heavy French accent and then explaining what he thinks it means. “‘Niece’ is what you say in English for a woman you’re sleeping with who isn’t your wife, non? And ‘on your wife’s side’ means your wife knows about it? My English is, how you say, not so good.”

Dennis the Menace, 5/24/24

I honestly love the vibe Dennis is giving off here. He genuinely is being good, just calmly sitting on the chair and reading a book, like he’s been doing for the last three days, and it sucks! It sucks ass and he hates it! He’s doing it because he has to but he will never like it.

Post Content

Between Friends, 4/20/24

Not to sound like the old person that I literally am, but TV used to be a lot fewer two-hour movie premises stretched out over eight to ten 45-minute episodes and a lot more 85 episodes about friends just kind of hanging out and then, if they were popular enough to get a little budget boost, the occasional Very Special Episode where the gang all went on vacation to Italy together or something like that, to the genuine delight of their fans. Anyway, Between Friends is a strip that’s been running since 1994 and is about the titular friends just kind of hanging out, and Uncle Lumpy and I have posted about 17 times over the past 14 years, so you guys are probably fans of it by now, right? Well, the gals are going to Paris, so get excited!

Beetle Bailey, 4/20/24

This strip got me to Google “mouth taping for snoring” to discover that yes, this is a thing, and yes the photos that you get are all extremely disturbing, like even more than this weird creepy drawing of Sarge. One of the tape brands promoted for this is literally called “Hostage Tape!” Anyway fingers crossed that my wife, who claims that I snore (unproven), doesn’t read the blog today.

Hi and Lois, 4/20/24

Wow, Hi and Lois is leaning into becoming an experimental slice-of-life strip with no punchlines, huh? They could do worse, I guess. In other news, Lois’s business is failing!

Post Content

Between Friends, 10/5/23

Many years ago, when I first started this blog, it was called “I Read The Comics So You Don’t Have To,” and sometimes I feel I’ve lost sight of that missions, so, here you go: Between Friends has been doing an on-again-off-again plot for it seems like weeks where Susan here is on Zoom with a coworker who has young kids and is very excited about getting away from them for a few days on a work trip. This is, I do not deny, hashtag relatable, but there’s just been so much of it, and if you’re just seeing this strip in isolation, you’re probably like, “I don’t see why it’s worth complaining about,” but trust me: I have read the comics so you don’t have to, and I’m here to tell you that it’s gotten real old and shows no sign of not getting older. I feel like today’s strip, which is just a bunch of dialogue coming out of a computer screen while a person makes various facial expressions in response, is particularly egregious. There’s a lot to say about the post-lockdown persistence of white collar work-from-home jobs, and as a longtime home office worker I’m generally in favor of the trend, but it’s a real problem for comic strips that rely on people interacting at work for visual interest.

Hi and Lois, 10/5/23

Man, I wish I could get as excited about anything as this child is hearing an old man talk about the last 30 years of technological progress! Or, well, given the medium and its current readership, I guess I should say I wish I could get as excited about anything as this child is in this fantasy deliberately engineered to make old people feel like children might be interested in what they have to say.