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Crankshaft, 12/6/21

Look, it’s not that I want to be a comics curmudgeon, all the time; sometimes it’s just important to me that comics do a better job of really zeroing in on the ideas they have instead of just running with the first iteration of a gag they come up with. So, like, with “Crankshaft is befuddled and angered by the modern world”: the thing where Ed’s favorite gardening catalog and then went out of business but got bought out by a blog or something is dumb and I don’t care for it. But Ed getting conned by a nootropics snake oil scam, which he presumably got wind of from a Facebook ad or an email forward, is definitely something I can get behind.

Blondie, 12/6/21

I think of Dagwood and Blondie as “old people,” to go along with the title of this post, because they were adults when I was a kid, but I guess they’re actually not old at all. They’re probably younger than I am now! Ha ha! Oh, life is so short and so fleeting! Anyway, if you’ve ever wondered what sort of sex stuff these two are into, it turns out it’s somehow both more banal and more distasteful than you could’ve imagined.

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Blondie, 11/19/21

I know I spend far too much time going on and on about comic book time here, but it really is an interesting lens for analyzing long-running strips like Blondie where all the characters stay more or less the same age. Like, for instance, to me as a reader, Ditzwell in the back seat there has been carpooling with Dagwood literally as long as I can remember, but the two of them haven’t gotten any older over that stretch, so who’s to say how long it’s been for them? Maybe they’re still getting acquainted with one another! Nevertheless, unless this is literally the first time Ditzwell has ever been in the car with Dagwood, he ought to know exactly who would buy these jelly beans. And let’s not even talk about say Herb, Dagwood’s ostensible best friend, who claims to be similarly mystified! It’s wild that a man of such obvious and simple pleasures can still somehow be an enigma to those closest to him.

Family Circus, 11/19/21

“Remember? He’s a robot! We’re all robots! Mommy and Daddy had real kids once, but no human could say the dardnest things efficiently enough for their needs.”

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Beetle Bailey, 11/17/21

Miss Buxley’s face isn’t what you would call “expressive” — it’s more what I would call “blowup sex doll” — but given that she’s juggling multiple devices to fulfill her work duties while her boss, who has given her all these duties, waxes nostalgic about the good old days, I do think her expression is successfully conveying the correct sentiment in panel two, which is “MURDER MUDER MURDER”.

Dick Tracy, 11/17/21

Given that the Apparatus is led by a guy who wears a full-body gimp suit just to hang around the office and staffed by people like Doubleup, a dude with Dagwood Bumstead hair who carries a bullwhip around at all times, it’s extremely hilarious to me that they just have a regular-ass receptionist named “Joanne” out at the front desk fielding calls. I assume she sort of knows she’s taking messages about murders and such but in the grand scheme of things she’s not paid enough to care about it, you know?

Pluggers, 11/17/21

The periods at the end of the sentences here really make this one grim. “Oh hey,” the dog-man says, without emotion. “A wheat penny from 1955. Huh.” There’s no joy or excitement in this realization. He’s not even sure why he checks anymore, really. Finding a wheat penny is just another thing that happens to him, from a long list of things that have happened to him, a list that is rapidly accelerating towards its conclusion.

Blondie, 11/17/21

Sorry, I don’t buy this “eBay” business at all. We all know Elmo is a crypto guy, and he would absolutely be trying to sell Dagwood an NFT of his little bird, which would be a much more lucrative scam.

Crankshaft, 11/17/21

“I mean, it would look terrible, but whatever! It’s your video! You asked me for help, do you what you want, see if I care.”