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Blondie, 2/4/24

I am of course more than happy to call Blondie wildly out of touch, culturally. But I gotta say, I trust this strip implicitly when it comes to the weird, terrible little games that old people play on Facebook that I only know about from their truly off-putting ads and that I assume somehow put recurring charges on your credit card that are very, very difficult to stop. To me, strips like today’s contain valuable ethnographical information and I am grateful for it.

Mark Trail, 2/4/24

OK, two questions here. One: why are we calling the shots we are giving to the horses a “fertility-control vaccine” instead of a “contraceptive shot”? We already have a perfectly good word in English for a medical intervention that prevents pregnancy, and it’s “contraceptive”! Two: why are they giving two-year doses of contraceptives fertility-control vaccines to, presumably, the female horses, when it’d probably be just as easy if not easier to permanently sterilize the male ones? Is this a plot by Big Horse Roundup to get easy government contracts every two years? FOLLOW THE MONEY, PEOPLE

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Dick Tracy, 1/23/24

I think it’s sweet that these two ladies keep a poster of their deceased corpse-guy (he was a corpse-guy before he was deceased, to be clear) mentor/lover(?) around. Still, I don’t know how he’d feel about having extremely generic aphorisms attributed to him in response to extremely specific situations like “I accidentally poisoned the wrong person but I need to continue to earn my living as a stage magician.”

Marvin, 1/23/24

The funny thing here is that we definitely know that Marvin didn’t buy that “I [heart] daddy” mug; probably it was Jenny, in a desperate attempt to convince her husband that their child is worthy of human affection. Anyway, she’s wrong, he isn’t, and Jeff is right to take this free vacation and Jenny should go with him. Honestly they should change their names and never come back!

Blondie, 1/23/24

A pretty good sign, I feel, that I’ve lived my life right is that when a photo goes viral of a guy at a Detroit Lions game eating a comically large sandwich, multiple people send it to me with some variation of “OMG it’s Dagwood!” Anyway, I’m pretty sure Dr. Austin kept saying “oh my” has he brought increasingly advanced instruments to bear on Dagwood’s torso, which all readings indicate isn’t full of guts like a normal human’s but just an endless, insatiable ~v o i d~

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Blondie, 1/17/24

I gotta say, “In honor of Kid Inventors Day, I created an alarm clock app that doesn’t work” is probably the funniest sentence I’ve ever read in Blondie, and I’ve read Blondie more or less every day for the bulk of my life. Anyway, it’s all downhill from there, and I honestly wouldn’t bother reading the rest of the strip if I were you.

Dennis the Menace, 1/17/24

Dennis has learned to draw a distinction between basic reactive pleasures and the higher-level emotion of pride, which derives from pleasing other people he respects or society at large. Not sure if that’s menacing or not. Guess it probably is, given today’s evidence of how he’s making sense of his own complex emotional landscape.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/17/24

Anyone else accidentally read that final word balloon as “th’ noose awaits !!” at first? No? Just me? Just me fantasizing that King Features is about to end its longest running strip in the most shocking way imaginable?

Beetle Bailey, 1/17/24

Wow, Beetle Bailey has portrayed an actually relatively recent trend — movie theaters with big reclining seats! Don’t worry, nobody on the Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC staff has actually been to one of these places, but a friend of theirs had it described to them by one of their grandkids, so they’re pretty sure they have a good idea of what one probably looks like.