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Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/15/22

Ah, good news, everybody! It looks like Andrzej and Tildy may have had some health scares, but they’re on the mend and all this drama has brought them closer together. It’s a perfect ending to the week as we look forward to seeing what new story begins on Monday, and [looks at calendar]. Oh. Um. Well, I hope everyone is excited to see two old people sitting quietly and watching the the 1930 Cooper/Dietrich film Morocco in a hospital room for the next six days!

Gil Thorp, 8/15/22

I’ve made many, many jokes over the years about how the Thorps’ kids have been memory holed. The strip’s new writer is bringing them back, though, and in their very first appearance is letting us know why they’ve been gone so long: they suck. A bratty teen and a little tattletale! Who’d want a get a Christmas card with pictures of these losers on it? Certainly not me!

Blondie, 8/15/22

A thing about this strip that makes me sad is that in the third panel you can just see that the gas station where the Bumsteads are filling up is called “Gooney Gas.” That’s a solid goofy Blondie business name and it deserves better than to be crammed in between two word balloons in such small type that it’s probably illegible in newspapers. Is there a Gooney Gas mascot? A bizarre slogan on par with “Say — then pay!”? America demands a full exploration of this intriguing corner of the Blondieverse!

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Blondie, 8/8/22

The non-Dagwood, non-Herb members of Dagwood’s carpool are named “Dwitzell” and “Claudia,” and any and all attempts to give them inner or indeed outer lives have failed to stick with me, but I do like that Claudia is on the record as not liking the phrase “hot enough for you.” Yes, it’s hot, but that doesn’t mean you have to resort to such vile cliches! To me, she has now become by far the most sympathetic character in the comic strip Blondie, which was actually pretty easy because I honestly couldn’t tell you which if any of the other characters I found particularly sympathetic.

Dennis the Menace, 8/8/22

Dennis is trying a real baller menace move here: to destroy Mr. Wilson emotionally by offering up himself — his neighbor’s most hated nemesis — as a substitute for the grandchildren the Wilsons never had. It’s a swing and a miss, though. George Wilson has never felt affection for another human being and never will! You’re the one who’s shown weakness here today, Dennis, and you will live to regret it!

Beetle Bailey, 8/8/22

OH MY GOD EVEN DOGS ARE STEALING VALOR NOW, WHAT HAS THIS COUNTRY COME TO

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Shoe, 8/6/22

The original iteration of Shoe was created by Jeff McNelly, a political cartoonist who presumably actually worked in a newsroom, some of the time, and so it makes sense that the characters are supposed to be engaged in journalistic banter on the regular. But at this point I assume everyone on the creative team is many steps removed from the editorial process, and so the closest you get to our bird-heroes doing real journalism is when they ask each other for headline ideas as a way to set up a terrible pun. Even still, usually the proposed stories that are the germ of these pun setups are things that might plausibly run in a newspaper? Until today. Today is the day when one of the last two employees at the last newspaper in this terrible bird-town thinks, “Enh, nobody reads this, what if I just wrote an article about my golf game? Write what you know, that’s what they say, right?”

In other non-realistic journalism news, it’s been a while since I’ve been in a newsroom myself, but I’m reasonably sure that it’s not common to just have ankle-deep piles of loose paper everywhere? But these are birds, I dunno. Maybe it’s for them to shit on.

Blondie, 8/6/22

If you’ve ever wondered if the Bumsteads are still horny for each other and how they “keep it fresh,” today’s strip has your answer: yes, and they go snorkling and ogle each other’s hot bods, underwater. A little weird, but honestly I think we all assumed it would be something much more off-putting involving food, so I’ll allow it.