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Daddy Daze, 2/6/22

It’s important to occasionally reflect on whether your actions are causing harm to others, even if that isn’t your intention or motivation. For instance, today’s Daddy Daze prompted me to consider: does the fact that I always refer to the father character in this strip as “the Daddy Daze daddy” and have never bothered to remember or research whether he has some actual name add to his sense that he’s losing his identity as part of the parenting process? In my defense, the Daddy Daze baby does have a name that is not uncommonly given in the strip, but I refuse to use it and only refer to him as “the Daddy Daze baby,” so I feel like overall I’m just being tough but fair.

Blondie, 2/6/22

“He’s having a real hard time of it, and doesn’t know where he is or where he’s going. Ha ha, he’s passed out face first into the snow! Guess I’m never going to have to return all those tools now!”

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Blondie, 1/27/22

Definitely my favorite character in today’s Blondie is Dagwood’s nameless co-worker, who’s just sipping his coffee and watching Dagwood post to Sandwichr, the social network for sandwiches and those who love them. Sure, it’s not that much fun to see someone else typing on the computer, but it kills some time, and Dagwood’s bound to say something wacky eventually, right? Anyway, despite what we’ve been led to believe by this strip, I think Mr. Dithers might be a little too lenient on his employees, actually.

Shoe, 1/27/22

Say what you will about the uncanny parody of human society that these sapient birds are acting out in the treetops here, but given that Roz has not only had a car accident but gone through an entire legal settlement process in the time since she saw the Perfesser last — and given how frequently he has lunch there, that can’t have been more than 48 hours or so — their legal system must be incredibly efficient.

Mary Worth, 1/27/22

Oh my God did this MFer really not make a phone call home as soon as he could and instead just decided to “surprise” all his friends and family by not being dead??? I certainly hope he’s about to start rapping out a truly awful parody of the Beastie Boys’ “Hey Ladies” with lyrics he wrote about his escape from death, obliterating any sense of goodwill any of the aforementioned ladies feel towards him.

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Blondie, 1/7/22

If you’re a longtime reader of this blog, you know that Elmo is one of my Blondie obsessions. Who is he? Where are his parents? Why does he spend so much time with Dagwood, an adult to whom he is unrelated? Well, a faithful reader recently sent me a report from her visit to the Library of Congress, where American tax dollars are (correctly) being used to maintain old Blondie strips that shed some light on the issue. Both Alexander and Cookie started out as babies in the strip before gradually aging up to teenagerhood and then staying there; as you can see in this strip from 1954, Elmo was originally introduced as a playmate/potential crush object for Cookie when they were about the same age.

Blondie, 7/21/54

Since Dagwood was originally concerned that Elmo would eventually steal Cookie away from his home, it’s particularly ironic that today Cookie and Alexander are usually off doing teenager things, leaving only eternally tween Elmo around to serve as Dagwood’s substitute child. However, as we can see in today’s strip, there are some family qualities that can never be replicated. Elmo is just brushing all those crumbs, which account for at least a dozen calories, onto the floor! A true Bumstead would just be hoovering them up into his insatiable maw. In the final panel of today’s strip, Dagwood grieves because no matter how much affection he has for Elmo, there will always be a gap between them.

(Meanwhile, the next to last panel of that 1954 strip reveals that, no matter what you think of the Bumstead living room arrangement that has Blondie perpetually sitting with her back to her husband, it’s at least an improvement over the previous scenario, in which she had to sit on the floor.)

Mary Worth, 1/7/22

One of my pet peeves is that so many media pundits are basically in the business of making short- or long-term predictions about what’s going to happen — in politics, the stock market, sports, whatever — but suffer almost no consequences when they are consistently and routinely wrong. Thus, in order to show my commitment to accountability, I want to acknowledge that while I predicted a couple days ago that Wilbur would do the Titanic “I’m the king of the world!” routine crying and alone, in fact he’ll be doing it alone and giggling and drunk, for about thirty to ninety seconds before he falls to his unmourned death.

Family Circus, 1/7/22

It’s Grandma’s facial expression here that really makes this panel for me. She just looks so happy! “Hell yeah,” she thinks, “this goop is gonna slide down my gullet in complete silence — just the way I like it.”