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Blondie, 7/14/05

So Blondie’s 75th anniversary continuity-thon is in full desperately clumsy swing, illustrating via its stumbly awkward weirdness why the strip does not generally tackle multi-day story arcs. Today’s strip intrigues me though. I’m assuming “Raphael” is either Blondie’s gay hairdresser or a Ninja Turtle who does hair styling as a sideline. The notion of a new ‘do for Blondie is also interesting. Will it be as shocking as Ma Family Circus’ sensible bob was in its day?

But I have to admit that what really caught my eye was this: in panels two and three, Blondie is sitting with her back to us and partly obscured by the sofa, and yet we can still see one of her breasts. And how many 75-year-olds can we say that about?

By the way, my jury service has come to an end. The case did not fit, so we had to acquit. Then the city gave me $30 for my trouble. Woo-hoo!

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Blondie, 6/6/05

I don’t have anything in particular to say about this Blondie strip, except that I like the word “Glambaster.” Is it someone’s last name? A product manufactured by the studiously ambiguous corporation that is Dithers Enterprises? An internal code name for some project in development? Whatever it is, it just rolls off the tongue. Glambaster! Glambaster! It’s the sort of thing that makes you think, “How would this word be portrayed in some sort of photo-rebus?” Well, wonder no more:

I thank you for your time.

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Blondie, 2/8/05

It took me a while to figure out why the first two panels of this otherwise bland installment of Blondie looked so odd to me. Then I realized that, most of the time, people in Blondie are about the size of Dagwood and Alexander in panel three; panels one and two offer an unusual closeup view. Which is not to say that we’re given any more details or a better view of things in those panels. In fact — and remember, this is just my entirely uneducated first impression — one might get the impression that panels one and two started life as standard-perspective Blondie drawings that were then just magnified electronically, for unfathomable but presumably aesthetic reasons.

One might also point out, if one were unkind, that panels one and two are nearly identical to one another, with only a few lines tweaked. But to do so would be gauche.

Question for you: has anyone ever worn both an old-school letterman jacket and a jauntily angled backwards baseball cap as Alexander does here? Discuss.