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Blondie, 2/8/25

Man, what’s your least favorite part of this deeply unpleasant Dagwood dream sequence? A lot of people are going to say “the glasses on the sandwich” or “the pot of gumbo on a burner that’s just kind of floating in space” or “the way you can’t quite tell if Dagwood is driven to chase the anthropomorphic sandwich by hunger or something more darkly sexual” or maybe even “why did they bother mentioning the Super Bowl but not put any football stuff in the dream sequence”, but for me, it’s the little “Po Boy” label on the sandwich. Like, come on. Do you expect us to believe that Dagwood would need to have a sandwich label in his own dream? Absolutely not. I don’t care if the idiot readers at home need to have the fact that this is “the Big Easy”‘s signature sandwich spelled out for them, I refuse to accept the way it compromises the verisimilitude of the dream sequence.

Hi and Lois, 2/8/25

Feel like this strip is the result of coming up with “the big bag store” as a darndest thing a kid would call Costco, but that’s really undermined by the fact that there are no bags in the strip. Everything is in boxes! That’s actually one of Costco’s whole things! Plus “big box store” is already a thing people say so you could have it be a double meaning? C’mon, man!

Six Chix, 2/8/25

Sorry to get all indignant there for a minute, I’ll try to chill out. Hey, were you worried that, what with all the apps today and such, Cupid wasn’t getting laid anymore? Well, good news.

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Hagar the Horrible, 2/6/25

I think the joke here is supposed to be “Lucky Eddie, who is notoriously soft and weak, is a cat guy,” and as a cat guy I’m not going to take the bait. I am going to point out that, as depicted in the strip, Lucky Eddie is much less a cat guy (are there really any running jokes about him liking cats?) as a fish guy, or more precisely a fish–lady guy. Which leads me to ask: what’s his mermaid girlfriend’s bathroom situation like? In the strip where they’re hanging out together and she’s floating in a fish tank, is the fish tank the equivalent of her litter box? Much to think about, if you like thinking about mermaids peeing and pooping, and I apologize because you probably don’t actually like thinking about that and it may be that I did get mad about the cat thing and took the bait a little bit.

Blondie, 2/6/25

Do you like those odds, Elmo? Because I don’t, actually. I mean, I think the set of pizza ingredient combos that anyone would want to eat are relatively limited and covered by the standard menus at most pizza places, and we don’t need to go that far beyond the limits. If you want to explore the possibilities of “infinite kinds” of pizza and call up some hapless restaurant and say “Yeah, gimmie a pizza with [spins wheel] bakelite crust, tomato sauce, and [spins wheel again] deuterium” be my guest, but I don’t think you’ll enjoy the results.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/6/25

Yeah, what is the deal? What the heck is the deal with Rex Morgan, exactly, or just, like, the deal in general? I for one would like to know! Like, really, earnestly, please explain the deal to me. Glad to see we’re getting to the bottom of what the deal is, finally.

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Blondie, 2/4/25

Today is in fact “Thank A Mail Carrier Day,” or at least it is according to National Day Calendar Dot Com, and I’m sure that’s good enough for the fake-holiday-obsessed Blondie creative team so it’s good enough for me. Now, while I always think it’s polite to thank someone who provides you with a service, even if they are just doing their job, this does seem like a kind of silly holiday, but you will note that the National Day Calendar Dot Com link provided above describes the event as National Thank A Mail Carrier Day, not Your Mail Carrier Day, which probably reflects the fact that most of us do not interact with our mail carrier on a regular basis, and many routes don’t have the same carrier every day, or may have different carriers delivering letters and packages at different times. Certainly most of us don’t have a consistent mail carrier who somehow manages to get there during a time when a 9 to 5 office worker would be home, and who hands us our mail personally and hangs around to shoot the shit a little bit instead of just putting the letters in the easily accessible mailbox and being on their way. Dagwood should be thanking him!

Dustin, 2/4/25

Dustin (the comic strip) is about the eternal struggle between dipshit son and asshole dad, and I reserve the bulk of my ire for the asshole dad, not because I deny Dustin’s dipshittery, but because the dad is usually depicted as the “correct” agonist in their conflict, when the true enlightened assessment is that they’re both wrong. Still, I’ve often found it unrealistic how quickly Dustin gets shot down in these anachronistic scenarios — like, he’s not hideous or anything and surely it takes a little while for his subpar personality to become obvious? But if he’s really leading with stuff like “I got my hair cut today,” then, yeah, I get it.

Dennis the Menace, 2/4/25

Oh no! Dennis has worked out for himself the idea of inelastic demand … truly one of the more menacing of economic laws!

Beetle Bailey, 2/4/25

I love how dead eyed everyone other than the visiting officer is in panel two. It’s like, yeah, there’s some wacky stuff going on here, but they’ve been dealing with it for like 70 years of strip time now and they’re pretty much over it. They’re not just “used to it”; frankly, they’re exhausted.