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Mary Worth, 7/30/24

A recurring question that arises in the increasingly Wilbur-focused era of Mary Worth we find ourselves in is: are we getting so much Wilbur because we’re expected to like and support him, or are we being repeatedly shown his worst humiliations, in order to create a strip that is nothing more than his personal hell? I’ve had my doubts, but today’s strip, in which Wilbur tells an incredulous fish that he communicated with another dead fish in a dream, and then we smash cut to Wilbur’s ex, whom Wilbur named the dead fish after, in the midst of an extremely erotic canoodle with her handsome boyfriend, certainly seems to point in one direction fairly strongly.

Blondie, 7/30/24

Blondie absolutely loves a “what’s a universal, non-controversial cultural touchstone of the moment we can do extremely lazy jokes about,” and obviously the Olympics are the pinnacle of that sort of thing, with the added advantage that they last for weeks. Yesterday we had a mildly funny joke about Dagwood getting in trouble for streaming the Olympics on his phone during a work meeting, but I’m actually kind of appalled by today’s strip, which seems to imply that Olympic runners have their performance scored by judges rather than simply being timed to see who finishes the event the fastest.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/30/24

I love it when a work of art sparks a conversation, raising not one but multiple questions about its characters and its world. For instance, today’s Snuffy Smith has me asking “Doesn’t ‘busking’ usually happen on a sidewalk in a big city? Why is Jughaid doing it out in the middle of an open field somewhere” but also “Doesn’t Jughaid wear that stupid hat all the time? Does Ol’ Bullet repeatedly attack him when he does, and if so why don’t we get to see it more often?”

Shoe, 7/30/24

Ha ha! A laugh track, get it? Because his political promises are laughable! Good one! Say, does anyone involved in the creation of Shoe know what a “website” is and how one works? Like have they ever used the internet, at all?

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Mary Worth, 7/28/24

Real talk: my initial thought reading the throwaway panels was “Ha ha, Wilbur wet the bed!” But no, actually, he finally achieved emotional closure about his dead fish because he had a dream where the fish called him (or his fishy dream avatar) “dad” and swam away with his friends into the fish afterlife, and then he woke up crying, which is substantially less dignified than wetting the bed.

Dennis the Menace, 7/28/24

You ever wonder what Henry and Alice talk about when they have the house to themselves, presumably because Dennis is next door making Mr. Wilson’s life miserable? Well, apparently they reflect on past Dennis menacing incidents, including ones so traumatizing that just the memory of them makes Alice feel a need to go lie down, so I have to admit my respect for his menacing game just went up exponentially.

Blondie, 7/28/24

If I walked into my barbershop and found a barber lounging casually in the chair, and he looked me right in the eye and said “Showtime!”, I would assume that I would soon be on the floor bleeding out from numerous wounds inflicted by a straight razor. Dagwood absolutely should be thankful that all he endured was some sub-par conversation!

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Dennis the Menace, 7/23/24

I’m on the record as saying that “Ha ha, Dennis’s mom can’t cook” is one of my least favorite Dennis the Menace running bits, but honestly this is a pretty good take on it. The fact that Dennis is drooling is what makes it for me, like he’s just completely lost control of himself because he’s experiencing taste pleasures beyond anything he imagined possible. He’s not, of course, but leaning into the bit just makes the performative cruelty extra menacing.

Hi and Lois, 7/23/24

I love how everyone is pleased with this arrangement except for Chip, who looks gobsmacked. He’s a romantic, kind of! Maybe he’d like to see the tender performances from [INSERT THE EXTREMELY ON-THE-NOSE NAMES OF UP-AND-COMING YOUNG ACTORS IN THE WALKER-BROWNEIVERSE HERE, LIKE, I DUNNO, “HUNK HANDSOME” AND “PRISCILLA PRETTY”] in Love Saga instead of the violent, puerile CGI slop of Missile Extreme, you ever think about that???

Blondie, 7/23/24

“Food-FOMO”? The actual abbreviation is clearly the much funnier “FOMOOF,” you clod, not that I expect anything better from a journalistic outfit that thinks a question mark with a hamburger as the little dot is somehow an appropriate graphic for this non-story. You make me sick.