Archive: Blondie

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Dick Tracy, 1/23/24

I think it’s sweet that these two ladies keep a poster of their deceased corpse-guy (he was a corpse-guy before he was deceased, to be clear) mentor/lover(?) around. Still, I don’t know how he’d feel about having extremely generic aphorisms attributed to him in response to extremely specific situations like “I accidentally poisoned the wrong person but I need to continue to earn my living as a stage magician.”

Marvin, 1/23/24

The funny thing here is that we definitely know that Marvin didn’t buy that “I [heart] daddy” mug; probably it was Jenny, in a desperate attempt to convince her husband that their child is worthy of human affection. Anyway, she’s wrong, he isn’t, and Jeff is right to take this free vacation and Jenny should go with him. Honestly they should change their names and never come back!

Blondie, 1/23/24

A pretty good sign, I feel, that I’ve lived my life right is that when a photo goes viral of a guy at a Detroit Lions game eating a comically large sandwich, multiple people send it to me with some variation of “OMG it’s Dagwood!” Anyway, I’m pretty sure Dr. Austin kept saying “oh my” has he brought increasingly advanced instruments to bear on Dagwood’s torso, which all readings indicate isn’t full of guts like a normal human’s but just an endless, insatiable ~v o i d~

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Blondie, 1/17/24

I gotta say, “In honor of Kid Inventors Day, I created an alarm clock app that doesn’t work” is probably the funniest sentence I’ve ever read in Blondie, and I’ve read Blondie more or less every day for the bulk of my life. Anyway, it’s all downhill from there, and I honestly wouldn’t bother reading the rest of the strip if I were you.

Dennis the Menace, 1/17/24

Dennis has learned to draw a distinction between basic reactive pleasures and the higher-level emotion of pride, which derives from pleasing other people he respects or society at large. Not sure if that’s menacing or not. Guess it probably is, given today’s evidence of how he’s making sense of his own complex emotional landscape.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/17/24

Anyone else accidentally read that final word balloon as “th’ noose awaits !!” at first? No? Just me? Just me fantasizing that King Features is about to end its longest running strip in the most shocking way imaginable?

Beetle Bailey, 1/17/24

Wow, Beetle Bailey has portrayed an actually relatively recent trend — movie theaters with big reclining seats! Don’t worry, nobody on the Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC staff has actually been to one of these places, but a friend of theirs had it described to them by one of their grandkids, so they’re pretty sure they have a good idea of what one probably looks like.

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The Lockhorns and Blondie, 1/11/24

The word app, as a shorthand for application in the computer programming sense, was as attested as early as 1992, which was 32 years ago. However, it probably didn’t really penetrate into the public consciousness until the dawn of the smartphone age, when Apple started using it to describe the small, self-contained applications running on its new iPhone platform and sold through its App Store, launched in 2008; by 2010, the term was used freely by iPhone and Android users alike, and had become so prevalent that it was the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year. This was 13 years ago, which, I regret to inform you, is quite a long time, actually, and the window for doing a strip where the punchline is just the word “app” has long closed. Comics creators: please make a note of this.

Gil Thorp, 1/11/24

How do you think Marty Moon’s recovery journey is going? It seems that he’s reached that long plateau, where a dry life extends endlessly before him and, while he’s not in immediate risk of backsliding, it’s hard to shake off the lethargy and emotional numbness. Oh, it’s in from midrange. Oh, Leo Atazhoon is going to be interviewed on the podcast. Ho hum. Nothing exclamation point-worthy. Look at these young men celebrating. Marty used to be like that once. Marty used to feel things. This strip needs to do right by our boy Moon and give him a wild and wacky subplot, something that’ll get him to snap out of it!