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Blondie, 10/30/23

I had a conversation with a friend the other day about those haunted houses you can go to at amusement parks and such for Halloween, and she drew a distinction that really stuck with me: some stuff you encounter at these things, like decor with skulls and bats and other goth business, is spooky, and other stuff, like people jumping out of the dark and grabbing you, is scary, and not everyone is into both! Anyway, what Blondie experienced — a couple weird cosplayers coming up with a series of ever-dumber Halloween puns — is spooky, whereas Dagwood’s day, in which he once again had to weigh his emotional health against his family’s finances when dealing with his abusive boss, is scary. Here to help!

Crock, 10/30/23

Big news! After 48 years of doing a dumb comics riff on P. C. Wren’s 1924 novel Beaut Geste, as of today Crock will start doing a dumb comics riff on Albert Camus’s 1947 novel The Plague.

Dennis the Menace, 10/30/23

Is it just me or does the perspective in this panel make Dennis look like he’s about seven feet tall, but with the bodily proportions of a child, making him a truly nightmarish figure? Anyway, if I could change one thing about him, it’d be that. I’d like him to be a normal size again.

Mary Worth, 10/30/23

“Ugh, it used to be we would have sex, but now it turns out that people you have sex with sometimes have opinions? That are different from yours??? What the heck!”

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Blondie, 10/28/23

Over the years, the syndicated comic strip Blondie shifted from the story of a carefree flapper and the dissolute failson who gave up his comfortable life to be with her to a story about a suburban dad who makes being hungry his whole personality, to the extent that he redefines the calendar itself so that each holiday primarily exists to provide an opportunity for a new and subtly different form of food monomania. For me, the thing that’s oddest about Blondie is that the universe around Dagwood is seemingly warped by the intensity of his own appetites, making him something of an outlier but by no means an aberration in his own world. Anyway, what do you make of the combo of “smiling and sweating” in the final panel here, as he enjoys this bird’s third weird holiday food ode? Does it represent “horny”? It has to, right? Very dark, in my opinion.

Gasoline Alley, 10/28/23

I hate to praise Rufus and Joel, but their proposal to capture this monstrous talking bear and display him to an amazed and horrified public for their own profit is frankly the most sensible one we’ve heard so far for dealing with this beast.

Six Chix, 10/28/23

Hey, wouldn’t it be interesting if pumpkins, like the ones you gut in order to make jack-o-lanterns, could experience fear, and sadness, and probably physical pain, too? Have a fun Halloween, everybody!

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Blondie, 10/10/23

I once saw an interview with John Singleton and Stephanie Allain, the producers of the movie Hustle and Flow, about a scene where the characters kick a woman out of the house they’re living in, and how physical to make that confrontation, and they settled on using as a model Fred Flintstone gently yet firmly dropping Dino on the front stoop in the opening credits of The Flintstones. Fred’s act in turn has a context in the time not so long ago when people’s pets freely roamed outside much of the time and in particular were not expected to stay indoors at night, though dogs at least usually got their own little house in the yard for shelter. This was an arrangement that might still hold in rural areas of the U.S. today but has been unheard of in cities and suburbs long enough that I found it puzzling when I watched decades-old Flintstones reruns in the early ’80s; but legacy newspaper comics are the most ossified form of cultural production known to science, and so Blondie was still sticking with it as late as 2007. Today, finally, in the futuristic year 2023, we have confirmation that Daisy lives inside full-time with the Bumsteads (though frankly we knew even back then she slept indoors some nights). Honestly the most unrealistic thing happening here is that Elmo knows what a “doghouse” is.

Gasoline Alley, 10/10/23

I don’t want to sound like a killjoy but, talking bears aside, the moral of this Gasoline Alley plot seems to be “if you find a child and don’t know where their parents are, and the child seems to like you, you can use trickery and force to stop the evil government from attempting to reunite the child with said parents,” which seems, uh, not great? Obviously it would be worse if anyone read Gasoline Alley and it had any chance of influencing any opinions about anything, but still.

Dennis the Menace, 10/10/23

Setting whatever menace Dennis thinks he’s perpetrating here aside, we need to acknowledge his “dentist” is clearly just Mr. Wilson, who has “disguised” himself by shaving his mustache. As a retired postal carrier, Mr. Wilson lacks any of the skills necessary to be a safe dental practitioner, but I fear that’s exactly the point.

Hi and Lois, 10/10/23

Sure, working as cartoonist for a legacy newspaper comic is probably not that creatively fulfilling and doesn’t pay very well either. But when it comes to turning an annoying experience you had into a “joke” that you can be sure literally hundreds of people will read, it simply can’t be beat.