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Blondie, 8/3/22

I feel like it goes without saying that today’s Blondie is some real sicko shit. Obviously it’s very gross that Blondie made this nightmare in the first place, or that Dagwood said “I look delicious!” or that he says he hopes he looks “half as good to you in real life” as this breakfast abomination, which looks real weird and fucked up, actually, but to me the worst part is that he’s eating it upside down. Like I know it’s turned that way so we, the readers, can get a good look at it, but if you gave someone a pancake decorated to look like a human face and they started eating it from the forehead side, I would absolutely believe they were a serial killer with no further information needed.

Gasoline Alley, 8/3/22

Good news, everybody! That spaceship they built in Gasoline Alley out of garbage actually worked! Why is that “good news,” you’re probably wondering? Well, assuming that the geopolitical situation in the Alleyverse is more or less similar to ours, the boys manning the radar machines over at the Strategic Missile Forces of the Russian Federation are probably pretty on edge when it comes to unexpected rocket launches coming from the continental United States, so with any luck the sprawling Gasoline Alley cast of characters is about to be wiped out in its entirety by a series of nuclear explosions.

Shoe, 8/3/22

This is only tangentially related to the strip here but my usual epithets for the anthropomorphic creatures in Shoe and Pluggers are phrases like “bird-person” or “beast-man” and it occurs to me that “people person” is technically what the opposite of that would be.

Mary Worth, 8/3/22

“Like, if you treat them real shitty, for instance! It turns out that other people can feel emotional and physical pain, just like we can? Real fucked up, isn’t it.”

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Blondie, 7/27/22

Man, that is a truly bone-chilling facial expression on Dagwood in the final panel. Not sure if his dream included an extended racing sequence before he had the epiphany that his opponent was edible, or if as soon as this giant 12-foot hot dog, dripping huge gobs of chili and condiments onto the ground, said, in a goofy, friendly voice, “Hey, Dag! Let’s race!” he knew how this would all end. But we too know how it must’ve ended: with him tackling the dream-creature to the ground and tearing off chunks of its flesh with his teeth, listening to it scream in agony and beg for mercy while he relentlessly ~c o n s u m e d~ the monstrosity. “Guess!” he says, as falls back into another dream where he gets to sate his appetite in the most ghastly of ways. Blondie, meanwhile, is going to be awake all night thinking about this.

Marvin, 7/27/22

Guess what, everyone! Marvin, launched on August 1, 1982, meaning that we’re just a few days short of its 40th anniversary! Unfortunately, Jenny and Jeff have finally realized that they are trapped in an eternal present where their child will always be a toddler and never learn to poop in a toilet, and their facial expressions in that second panel indicate that, armed with their new knowledge, they now have the power to simply walk away and never appear in this strip again, which means that we’re not going to quite get to 40. R.I.P. the comic strip Marvin, 1982-2022.

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Blondie, 7/20/22

One of my least favorite running bits in this strip is when Dagwood and his work friends enact some elaborate scenario to match up with whatever pan-cultural event or sports championship or anniversary is on the big calendar hanging on the wall over at Blondie HQ. But I really appreciate how this strip subverted my expectations: I genuinely thought the final panel would be some dumb scene with people in homemade spacesuits or whatever but instead it’s just Dithers saying “Get it? He’s a big lazy dipshit! Just look at him. Doesn’t really have anything to do with the moon, I just wanted an excuse to point that out.”

Six Chix, 7/20/22

I genuinely appreciate the scenario being laid out here: that this is a sophisticated vampire bar where humans are killed and drained of their blood (presumably not in that order) in the kitchen so that the clientele can just enjoy their sustenance in a civilized way from glassware without having to fight for it for once, but Vlad and his newfangled vegan vampirism is so repellent to the proprietors that they just threw coffin full of oranges at him and were like “Here, you figure it out, you sick freak.”