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Blondie and Hi and Lois, 5/20/23

As a participant in the childfree lifestyle, I appreciate what representation I can find in the comics, even if it’s just Dagwood and Blondie’s best only friends Herb and Tootsie, or Hi and Lois’s best friends Hi’s coworker Thirsty and his wife Irma, who they keep at arm’s length. Anyway, Thirsty has at least come round to his opinion on procreation based on hard experience over a too-short fence, whereas Herb seems to be guessing at “parenting” activities based on movies he saw 20 years ago.

Judge Parker, 5/20/23

Oh, right, remember Eric, the traumatized son of the murderous meth judge? Well, his dad went to jail and now he’s living with Abbey, or maybe with Abbey’s horses. Abbey has been “feeling lost” ever since her dumb business venture, her political career, and her marriage all failed, but she has an idea, if Sophie is willing the help! (The idea is using Eric and Sophie to breed a new “master race” of weird sad foundling kids who ended up on Abbey’s ranch for whatever reason.)

Beetle Bailey, 5/20/23

OK, so the bad news is that we’re fighting another war, but the good news is that after like 70-plus years, the military has determined that Beetle is finally adequately trained to fight in it.

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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!”