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Blondie, 3/28/25

There is, as is often the case with Blondie, a Lot Going On Here, but let’s not sleep on the TV announcer appearing to react to Dagwood’s dismissal in the second panel. It’s as if they’re all too aware they exist only to be viewed by Dagwood, the center of this comic’s universe and the pivot point of its reality. “Please don’t change the channel! We’ll do a show that caters to your weirdo fetishes! I can’t go back to the void again! I can’t!”

Hagar the Horrible, 3/28/25

Honi’s romance with Lute is much frowned upon by her parents, generally playing on the trope of “Oh god our daughter is in love with an unsuccessful musician”, but today’s strip is I think the first I’ve seen that actually gets into what the lived experience of being in love with an unsuccessful musician is actually like. She goes to gigs with him at shitty clubs! She actually enjoys his music! She doesn’t get that nobody else does! He has to tell her stuff like “Uh, baby, the vibes were off”!

Family Circus, 3/28/25

Really enjoying the two Keane facial expressions here. Jeffy is wounded, obviously, but also kind of frozen and can’t quite articulate what exactly he’s feeling, while Ma Keane is like “Look, man, we all think this stuff, but we try not to say it, OK?”

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 3/16/25

One of the most famous and beloved Far Side panels involves a group of vultures sitting in a circle on the ground, and one of them is wearing a cowboy hat and jacket and saying “Look at me, everybody! I’m a cowboy! Howdy, howdy, howdy!” Is it dark? Sure, but the darkness is leavened by the fact that the vulture is being silly in a very specific way, and, somewhat crucially, by the fact that the presence of the dead and now mostly naked cowboy is only implied, his body obscured by the scavengers who are in the process of eating it. In today’s Mother Goose and Grimm, by contrast, a rotting human corpse is quite visible, and the vultures are merely celebrating with bug-eyed, manic expressions as they prepare to feast on his rotting flesh. I don’t think the vibes are anywhere near as good in this one, to be honest.

Blondie, 3/16/25

Today’s Blondie, like a substantial majority of Blondies, is pretty forgettable, but I do really enjoy Blondie’s deadpan “uh-huh” in the dead center panel. You gotta imagine that being married to Dagwood, or to any of the primary characters in legacy comic strips, is, you know, a lot.

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Blondie, 3/15/25

You gotta imagine that, when you’re talking to Dagwood Bumstead, there’s always a danger that he’s going to stare off into the distance, licking his lips, as he descends into a food-driven fugue state. It’s probably pretty off-putting and it’s honestly surprising that more people don’t just avoid him. Certainly his mailman has no real professional obligation to interact with him as much as he does!

Daddy Daze, 3/15/25

The central mystery of Daddy Daze is, I suppose, whether the Daddy Daze baby actually communicates with the Daddy Daze daddy in an elaborate language of “ba”s that the Daddy Daze daddy can understand, or if literally every strip we see is just the Daddy Daze daddy doing an elaborate series of bits with a baby who is too young to consent to participate in them. But the secondary mystery is undoubtedly “Why are the “Daddy Daze daddy and the infrequently seen Daddy Daze mommy no longer together, despite the fact that they had a baby together quite recently?” Today, the answer is clearly that, whether the baby is a willing participant or not, a life with the Daddy Daze daddy is obviously a life spent subject to endless bits, and such a life is to be avoided at all costs.

Judge Parker, 3/15/25

Aw, isn’t that nice? Randy is sad about his sister going to prison, so his trained CIA assassin wife is helping him cope by cutting off his oxygen supply, sending him off to a peaceful sleep, possibly forever.