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Mary Worth, 2/9/25

I have not really been talking about this Mary Worth plotline much, because it turns out that seeing a big beefy asshole act in a way that’s clearly emotionally abusive towards his girlfriend and feels like it could become physically abusive at any moment isn’t “fun” or “funny” the way most of the dysfunctional antics in this strip are. However, when the big physical confrontation takes the form of a shove to Jared’s chest so feeble that even he seems surprised by it? And Dawn reacts with the supporting attack of “accidentally” dropping a bowling ball on Dirk’s foot? And then he calls her something truly gasp-worthy, probably a “Christ-abandoned trollop”? Well, even I have to admit: that’s pretty funny, and it gets even funnier when you see that poor Aeschylus, who wrote a civilization-defining trilogy about ghastly cycles of murder and revenge and divine wrath only being resolved by Athena founding institutions of human justice, has been dragged in to provide a sheen of legitimacy to the proceedings. Don’t worry, though: none of the bajillion websites that have this quote on them tell you which play it’s from, which is a good sign that it’s made up, so Aeschylus is in fact chilling in the Greek underworld and does not need to trouble himself with Dawn’s romantic trials. (Google’s Gemini AI on separate queries tried to tell me that the line is from The Remembered, which is not an actual play, and that while it’s not from a specific play it captures the themes of the Oresteia, which is pretty funny in its own right.)

Blondie, 2/9/25

There’s a lot of questions to ask here (Who are these people and why are they attending Dagwood’s Super Bowl party in lieu of any of his actual friends or acquaintances? How committed are they to the old-time football helmet bit? Is that one guy supposed to be British?) but mostly I want to criticize the final panel. This is the comics! What you depict is only limited by your imagination! Why is this set up to imply that even within the universe of the strip, one of these guys is just visualizing a military flyover, when the artist could’ve just depicted a squadron of actual fighter jets swooping low over Dagwood’s suburban neighborhood, deafening and terrifying everyone for miles around and, if we’re lucky, dropping a BLU-109/B “bunker buster” bomb on the Bumstead residence and ending our national nightmare forever?

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Blondie, 2/8/25

Man, what’s your least favorite part of this deeply unpleasant Dagwood dream sequence? A lot of people are going to say “the glasses on the sandwich” or “the pot of gumbo on a burner that’s just kind of floating in space” or “the way you can’t quite tell if Dagwood is driven to chase the anthropomorphic sandwich by hunger or something more darkly sexual” or maybe even “why did they bother mentioning the Super Bowl but not put any football stuff in the dream sequence”, but for me, it’s the little “Po Boy” label on the sandwich. Like, come on. Do you expect us to believe that Dagwood would need to have a sandwich label in his own dream? Absolutely not. I don’t care if the idiot readers at home need to have the fact that this is “the Big Easy”‘s signature sandwich spelled out for them, I refuse to accept the way it compromises the verisimilitude of the dream sequence.

Hi and Lois, 2/8/25

Feel like this strip is the result of coming up with “the big bag store” as a darndest thing a kid would call Costco, but that’s really undermined by the fact that there are no bags in the strip. Everything is in boxes! That’s actually one of Costco’s whole things! Plus “big box store” is already a thing people say so you could have it be a double meaning? C’mon, man!

Six Chix, 2/8/25

Sorry to get all indignant there for a minute, I’ll try to chill out. Hey, were you worried that, what with all the apps today and such, Cupid wasn’t getting laid anymore? Well, good news.

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Hagar the Horrible, 2/6/25

I think the joke here is supposed to be “Lucky Eddie, who is notoriously soft and weak, is a cat guy,” and as a cat guy I’m not going to take the bait. I am going to point out that, as depicted in the strip, Lucky Eddie is much less a cat guy (are there really any running jokes about him liking cats?) as a fish guy, or more precisely a fish–lady guy. Which leads me to ask: what’s his mermaid girlfriend’s bathroom situation like? In the strip where they’re hanging out together and she’s floating in a fish tank, is the fish tank the equivalent of her litter box? Much to think about, if you like thinking about mermaids peeing and pooping, and I apologize because you probably don’t actually like thinking about that and it may be that I did get mad about the cat thing and took the bait a little bit.

Blondie, 2/6/25

Do you like those odds, Elmo? Because I don’t, actually. I mean, I think the set of pizza ingredient combos that anyone would want to eat are relatively limited and covered by the standard menus at most pizza places, and we don’t need to go that far beyond the limits. If you want to explore the possibilities of “infinite kinds” of pizza and call up some hapless restaurant and say “Yeah, gimmie a pizza with [spins wheel] bakelite crust, tomato sauce, and [spins wheel again] deuterium” be my guest, but I don’t think you’ll enjoy the results.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/6/25

Yeah, what is the deal? What the heck is the deal with Rex Morgan, exactly, or just, like, the deal in general? I for one would like to know! Like, really, earnestly, please explain the deal to me. Glad to see we’re getting to the bottom of what the deal is, finally.