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Beetle Bailey, 9/23/21

Gourmet, as I’m sure we all remember, stopped publication in 2009. Plato may subscribe to Fine Food, surely a much lesser imitation of the storied original, but he clings to the memory of a more genteel world. As his facial expression in panel two makes clear, that gets harder every day.

Blondie, 9/23/21

YOU HEAR THAT, NERDS? YOU THINK YOU’RE BETTER THAN ME, JUST BECAUSE YOU WERE SMART AND GOOD AT SCHOOL OR WHATEVER? WELL, YOU’RE GOING TO PRISON, YOU HEAR ME? PRISON!!!!

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Blondie, 9/18/21

A strip like Blondie exists in a sort of eternal present, its world changing almost imperceptibly slowly over time to stay vaguely contemporary, so it doesn’t really have any fixed “lore” per se. But still, I feel like we’re getting a lot of information here that has no foundation in previous strips. Alexander is a musician? Alexander has friends? The Bumsteads have a vast empty room adjacent to their living room that can be turned into an impromptu stage for Alexander and the friends he seems to have suddenly acquired? At least this all is in the service of a really solid joke, about Alexander’s band playing a tribute (???) to concert crowds everywhere (????) although not here because they’re just playing in the Bumsteads’ house, for his parents. This punchline is both conceptually airtight and very funny, and I enjoyed it a lot.

Pluggers, 9/18/21

You may be a plugger if you’re still wearing clip-on ties. May! We’re not really sure. Despite this strip being named Pluggers, we’ve kind of lost the thread on what pluggers’ whole deal is and we don’t want to say anything we can’t take back. Will this offend pluggers? Non-pluggers? Clip-on tie wearers? Clip-on tie shunners? People who used to wear clip-on ties but stopped for some reason? Please don’t get mad at us!

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/26/21

I’m a big believer that most comic-strip level gags should include exactly the amount of information they need to make the joke work and no more, which is why it drives me up the wall that this strip includes the name of Loweezy’s sister. It would be bad enough that she just named her sister (whom we’ve never see in the strip) for no reason, since it creates the nagging suspicion that this sister, as opposed to some other sister, is important to make the punchline work for some reason. But then they go and name her “Zoney!” “Loweezy” is the post-apocalyptic Hootin’ Holler newspeak for “Louisa,” but what the hell is “Zoney” derived from? Arizona? Does the vague memory of distant Arizona live on in Holler-adjacent onomastics? Gah, the fact that they added this name to her word balloon means that we ended up with two exclamation points alone on their own line! GAH!!!

Blondie, 8/26/21

One has to wonder who the “I” in Dagwood’s proposed social media clickbait headline is intended to be. It’s clearly not Dagwood, who is the star of the video. In fact, one wonders who’s filming this obviously staged scene in the first place, and what sad benefits Dagwood promised them for helping launch him to TikTok stardom.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/26/21

Oh, wow, sorry I said yesterday that this Funky Winkerbean development was going to be about sex, when in fact it’s about the most obvious plot twist anyone could imagine. Don’t worry, thought: Les still had an orgasm.

Mary Worth, 8/26/21

WILBUR’S IN A PISS FIGHT WITH A CAT, EVERYONE

A PISS FIGHT

IT’S CHRISTMAS IN AUGUST