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Archive: Blondie

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Unpleasantly delicious Tuesday

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Blondie, 11/13/18

One of the more unpleasant transformations of Dagwood Bumstead over the years has been the process by which we’ve moved from “Ha ha, Dagwood sure likes to eat comically large sandwiches!” to “Dagwood is an Appetite who lives to Consume.” Today’s strip is particularly disturbing: Dagwood has, for as long as he can remember, been uniquely able to communicate with turkeys in their own language. Does this give him more empathy for the majestic birds? No. Seeing into their minds, understanding their desires, hearing their pleas for mercy — to Dagwood, that only makes them more delicious.

Gil Thorp, 11/13/18

Welp, it looks like the vaguely exciting notion of Tiki being an imposter has given way to the much duller reality of Tiki’s family engaging in low-level fraud. The final panel makes the completely implausible suggestion that the Milford athletic department somehow has higher standards than the rest of the school administration.

Marvin, 11/13/18

Sometimes Marvin does half-assed plots or at least “theme” weeks, so let me just assure you that nothing like that is happening here! There was no setup or anything yesterday for this: a comic where a toddler has been thrown into a cage full of angry feral dogs who are probably seconds away from eating him.

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Spooktacular Wednesday

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Crankshaft, 10/31/18

So Crankshaft has been doing a “the kids did not react well to Ed’s Halloween costume” bit for a couple days and I have to admit that at first I didn’t really get it? Like, yesterday, his co-workers were like “Ha ha, Ed picked the wrong costume” and I genuinely thought it was because the horizontal stripes were supposed to be unflattering, but I guess it’s just that Freddy Krueger is too scary for the youths. Which … I mean, look, I literally have never seen any films in the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise because I’m an absolute coward when it comes to horror movies. But is a burnt nightmare man with a claw glove objectively scarier, as a concept, than an undead ghoul with fangs who thirsts for blood and can either kill you or transform you into a cursed being like himself at his whim, or scarier than a shambling parody of life pieced together from rotting corpses by a crazed scientist in violation of God’s law? I would argue the answer is no, and I only find Freddy scarier because he was a splashy new horror icon of my formative years, whereas Draculas and Frankensteins and such had been part of the cultural background radiation of my whole life. But as for those kids on Ed’s bus … well, did you know that the first Nightmare on Elm Street film came out 34 years ago? That’s a long time! Those kids aren’t going to find Freddy uniquely terrifying, certainly not compared to Ed Crankshaft, the man who’s actually trying to kill them.

Blondie, 10/31/18

I still don’t feel like I have a full handle on what’s happening in today’s Blondie. Has Dagwood always worried that his barber was planning to stab him to death with scissors? I would’ve said that seems paranoid but after seeing this strip I’m honestly not so sure!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/31/18

The Smif-Barlow feud has of course caused endless tragedy in Hootin’ Holler, its origins long forgotten but the occasional outbreak of violence renewing it every generation. I actually wonder how Lukey fits into it — is his family considered a client of the Smifs, or perhaps they’re linked by kinship somehow? Anyway, today’s strip shows how the violence perpetuates itself: Barlow isn’t harming anyone, but Snuffy and Lukey have to make a show of being “afraid” of him as he wanders onto their turf to justify the vicious beating they’re about to dish out in the moonless dark.

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Devil-may-care Saturday

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Beetle Bailey, 10/13/18

Beetle Bailey’s Rocky, created in order to cash in on the “rock ‘n’ roll” music the kids loved so much in the ’50s, has over the years taken on a number of conflicting attributes that might be vaguely lumped together as “anti-establishment”: he’s been an anti-war protestor, a nihilist, a mutineer and assassin, a violent street tough, and an abstract impressionist, so sure, let’s make him a muckraking journalist as well, for some reason! Anyway, panel two is a good image for those of you who can only get off when thinking about an old man ashamed of his own incontinence, I guess.

Hagar the Horrible, 10/13/18

Long-distance Viking trade networks did result in cultural contacts between medieval Arabs and Scandinavians, so it’s plausible that a djinni could find itself in the The Horrible’s Norwegian shack. And djinn are canonically charismatic, so it makes sense that Helga would want to have sex with this Middle Eastern spirit being and condemn her ungrateful husband to an eternity trapped in a lamp. This all checks out!

Blondie and Marvin, 10/13/18

Say, are you a comfortable middle-aged suburbanite syndicated cartoonist looking for a venue where you can work out your irritation with, say, those showboating NBA players, or the poor? Well, good news!