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Blondie, 11/11/24

Remember just weeks ago, when Dagwood dismissed the pumpkin spice concept, now in its second decade, as a mere passing craze? Well, apparently he’s finally taken a single sip of a chain coffee shop’s pumpkin spice latte and now? Now he can’t get enough. It’s no longer a goofy, female-coded trend that Dagwood as a middle-aged suburbanite chuckles at with amusement: now it’s associated with the consumption of foodstuffs, triggering the most primal urges of Dagwood the endlessly insatiable Appetite.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/11/24

Remember a few years back, when Mud was Truck’s rival for Wanda’s affections? Well, now he’s been thoroughly brainwashed and those days are long behind him, to the extent that he’s now learned about Truck and Wanda’s engagement and only feels overwhelming tenderness for the two of them and wants the best for their future happiness. I swear that panel two here is the closest I’ve ever seen to someone with heart eyes without actually having hearts drawn in their eyes.

Gil Thorp, 11/11/24

Remember last month, when Gil had a massive heart attack, from coaching stress? Gil does! Gil would rather not have another one. And sure, his assistant coaches simply cannot coax wins out of the Mudlarks, but was Gil ever that good at coaxing wins out of his team, really? Something to think about as he takes a long, luxurious sip of coffee. You know, it really is better when you make it in a French press, but who has the time? Well, Gil does, now!

Mary Worth, 11/11/24

Remember when Estelle and Ed got married, just last week? Well, Dr. Jeff doesn’t think they’re going to last. Just a gut feeling he has, mostly based on their fundamental incompatibility and the way they used Mary’s trite advice to paper over a big gulf in what they expect out of a relationship. We’ll see, though! Ha ha!

Marvin, 11/11/24

Remember in 1776, when the U.S. threw off the yoke of British rule? Well, Marvin clearly doesn’t, as his new boat pledges allegiance to His Majesty Charles III of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Honestly, it makes me sick.

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Blondie, 11/2/24

The Blondie creative team is usually very locked in to whatever big calendar full of real and fake holidays that’s clearly hanging up in the writer’s room, so today’s misstep is actually kind of surprising to me. Sure, it was possible, weeks ago when this strip was written, that game six of the World Series might’ve been played on November 1, but it was also possible that one of the teams would wrap it up in five games or less, as one of them in fact did (go Dodgers!). Anyway, I get why you’d risk it though, the glaring error is absolutely worth it to deliver this tight, flawless joke about a mailman streaming the baseball game from the night before, so his trainee has to talk to one of the mail route customers, like the regular guy usually does, about something that we don’t need to bother explaining, you know, the usual customer-mailman conversations we all know and love and have every day.

Marvin, 11/2/24

Of the weird holdover jokes from an entirely different era of gender relations that routinely pop up in newspaper comics, I have to say that “haha, it’s women’s job to cook but this particular woman is really bad at it!” are my absolute least favorite. The particular woman in question could be the speaking character’s mother, wife, or (as in this case) daughter, each possibility carrying with it its own specific unpleasant vibe. That said, I do think today’s Marvin is kind of funny because usually you think of “runing your appetite” as something you do with snacking, but Roy is just straight-up eating a whole actual meal here. Like he knows Jenny’s cooking is terrible, he wants no part of it, and he’s just made his own dinner early, because he’s fully self-sufficient.

Beetle Bailey, 11/2/24

Some days I think I’ve left the snickering sexual innuendo I was prone to in this blog’s early days behind, but then I encounter a strip like “Lt. Fuzz decides to horn in on General Halftrack’s threesome,” sigh heavily, and realize I will simply not be able to help myself. Anyway, here’s today’s Beetle Bailey, in which Lt. Fuzz decides to horn in on General Halftrack’s threesome.

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Blondie, 10/26/24

Look, clearly I’m not as young as I was when I launched this blog back in 2004, and if I had a chance to tell that 29-year-old what what aging would be like, I would say that it really fucks with your sense of time: things that you think of as happening just the other day may, in fact, have happened literally years ago. But writing about the legacy comics definitely helps “keep you young,” not in the sense that comics are a medium for children or anything, but rather in the sense that the legacy strips are all churned out by old guys, so you get a lot of cautionary examples of how not to be a clueless old guy. For instance, no matter how novel something seems to me, I would do a little research about it before committing to print the declaration that it constitutes a “hot craze.” Did you know that Starbucks has been selling pumpkin spice lattes since 2003? That they are, in fact, even older than this blog? I’m just saying. Making wry commentary about Mary Worth may have once been a hot craze, but it is no longer, and neither, I regret to inform both Elmo and Dagwood, is pumpkin spice.

Beetle Bailey, 10/26/24

I actually really like how happy all the officers are in the first panel. It would’ve been easy, given the joke, to make them sullen or angry that their team is losing, and expressing their rage in a nonstop stream of obscenities. But they’re havng a great time! They’re exuberant swearers! That changes the whole dynamic.

Hi and Lois, 10/26/24

OK, so earlier this week I made my occasional reference to the occasional colorist mistakes that you see in the comics, but this is definitely the funniest one yet. Just imagine some unfortunate, underpaid soul, possibly working in a country where baseball is not a well known pastime, squinting at Ditto’s hat and thinking, “So … ‘Sox’? That’s short for Red Sox, right? Great, I have this one covered.”