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Folks, we need to start off on a sad note: Dennis Lien, who for many years posted in the comments here as Shrug, passed away last week under hospice care. He was a great force for good vibes on this site and he will really be missed!

Blondie, 4/17/23

Dagwood can tell Alexander is “getting serious” romantically because he’s wearing “clothes that fit,” like a monocolored t-shirt that he carefully tucks into his belted khakis. The extent to which this comic doesn’t understand teenagers manages to go even beyond the extent to which it doesn’t understand adults, which is really saying something.

Gil Thorp, 4/17/23

MILFORD GEOGRAPHY ALERT: today we establish definitively that Milford is in the “pop” zone, and while this encompasses a broad swath of the United States, from the Great Lakes to the Great Plains to Rockies to the Pacific Northwest, it seems to definitively cut out other commonly cited location possibilities, like Connecticut. Sadly, Hoo Dad’s Root Beer does not appear to be a real regional product that we could use to narrow things down further, but I will provide more data on this as it comes in.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/17/23

If you’re curious about what educational and intellectual life in Hootin’ Holler is like, I’d like to point out that Jughaid is thumbing through what appears to be an unbound six-page leaflet about volcanos, which I assume has been written by hand.

Crock, 4/17/23

Oh look, today’s Crock rerun is a joke about, uh, children getting married to adults? Here’s hopin that this is what it finally takes to get Crock cancelled (I will accept either the modern “cancel culture” sense of the word or the more traditional “they stop running it newspapers” sense, whatever it takes).

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Blondie, 4/16/23

My impression of Blondie and Bumstead’s personal history goes something like this: they has a brief and dissolute young adulthood during the Great Depression during which they met and married one another, after which time they settled into suburban domesticity for the next 90 years of unending middle age, their past vanishing away into mist. Now, does this make any internal sense? No, obviously not, but it still feels right to me and frankly strips like this, which imply that either of them had a life before they met that they can remember, are extremely off-putting. Unless the guy who used to wear this stupid hat was Dagwood himself at some point in their eternal marriage, and Blondie remembers and he can’t! If Blondie can retain memories while Dagwood exists in an undending present, that would explain a lot, although honestly you’d think she’d be a lot angrier.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/16/23

Sorry, I cannot simultaneously believe that Rene is such a master of beardcraft that he can create near-impenetrable disguises for spying on his enemies, and yet he still worries that his Dr. Mirakle get up wasn’t good enough for Hank Jr., or was good enough at first but he’ll remember who he was hours later. It doesn’t add up! Unless the goal is for Hank to spot his new disguise to dispel suspicions. “That Mirakle guy reminds me of somebody — can’t put my finger on it — oh, I guess it’s that guy over there with the weird chinbeard and the hat! Must’ve seen him around. Mystery solved!”

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Mary Worth, 4/12/23

Of the several minimum wage office temp jobs I held between semesters when I was in grad school, probably the best was the summer I spent in a vault under the Wells Fargo HQ in downtown San Francisco, helping alphabetize a huge collection of wills that had been entrusted to various regional banks that Wells Fargo had absorbed over the previous decade. This job was the “best” in the sense that we were let into the vault in the morning and ushered out at night and otherwise received no supervision, had no real set goals or other sense of how fast we were supposed to be going, could play music as loud as we wanted and take two-hour lunches, could answer the phone down there by saying “Hello, you’ve reached … The Vault” as if we were working at the city’s hottest nightclub, etc. Now, if you were someone who had in fact gvien your last will and testament to the San Luis Obispo Savings and Loan for safekeeping, my job activities that summer might’ve given you some pause, as we were definitely not trained in any kind of archival preservation techniques and even our alphabetizing was a little haphazard; but most of the wills we were dealing with had been filed decades earlier and had probably been superseded by newer ones, while the old forgotten wills had simply been passed from bank to bank, long after the customers’ deaths, until they ended up in our lap, because some cover-your-ass decision by the legal department mandated that Wells Fargo had to do the bare minimum to make any specific will in the pile findable in a pinch.

Anyway, I remember two things about the wills, which we temps absolutely would open up at random and read to one another: they often contained a lot of juicy family drama, especially concerning what were euphemistically referred to as the “natural children” of the person writing the will, and some of the names were very funny. Unfortunately, because this was 25 years ago and my brain has mostly puddingified in the interim, the only name from the list that I can remember specifically is “Stella Patella,” but you have to admit that’s a pretty good one! This has been a very long and roundabout way to say that I loved today’s Mary Worth because it taught me that one fun aspect of working at a vet is that you get to learn all the wild things people name their pets, which probably range from the very good to the very bad. It doesn’t make up for all the depressing euthanasia business, but I bet it’s pretty neat.

Gasoline Alley, 4/12/23

Ha ha, as easily predicted, these dumb children have immediately started blabbing to a resident of 1863 about how in the future ladies can be cops and other potentially timestream-wrecking business. “STOP HER,” hisses Ida Knoe, the evil time-travelling doll, “SHE’S LIABLE TO LET IT SLIP THAT WE ARE FROM THE FUTURE!” How many children has Ida Knoe brought backwards in time and then had to murder in order to keep the universe intact? Probably a lot! Too bad her programming (?) doesn’t allow her to learn from her mistakes.

Dennis the Menace, 4/12/23

Kudos, I guess, for Dennis the Menace having a gag where Dennis unleashes the sort of sick burn an actual six year old might use. Unfortunately, like many things an actual six year old would say, it isn’t particularly menacing, or particularly funny.

Blondie, 4/12/23

I find it interesting that we’re not seeing the full carpool in panel three. It’s only when Dagwood is finally alone with his most intimate friend that he can truly confess the sort of sick shit that plays in a loop in his brain 24/7.