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Archive: Blondie

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Mark Trail, 4/17/21

You know, one thing I didn’t really like about the first plot of new-look Mark Trail was that it lacked truly cartoonishly hateable villain — yes, confronting the sins of one’s father has a long literary history, but you sort of knew that this was a complex relationship that would eventually, after a fashion, be healed. But a guy who used to go to high school with Mark, who’s real condescending to him and is now some kind of cricket-based protein powder impresario and social medial influencer? That’s a guy who we’re all hoping goes viral on Bikbok when Mark punches him in the face.

Blondie and Dennis the Menace, 4/7/21

I’ve always assumed that Blondie is going for a whole Dennis vs. Mr. Wilson vibe in its Dagwood and Elmo strips, and I have to say that it simply does not come anywhere close to it. There’s a real sense of animus there that Blondie’s anodyne amiability is simply incapable of capturing.

Pluggers, 4/7/21

I don’t usually praise the art in Pluggers, but I genuinely love the expression on kangaroo-lady’s face here. That is 100% the look of a woman who plans to file for divorce two weeks to the day after she gets her second vaccine dose, and has in fact taken any number of concrete steps to make that process go as quickly as possible.

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Generational strife

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Dustin, 4/11/21

Not sure what makes me madder here: that Dustin produces this massive hanger-tangle out of nowhere; that this comic’s writer has apparently never heard the words “anger” or “hanger” spoken aloud, and just assumes based on their spelling that they rhyme and can thus be deployed for today’s punchline; or that the strip opens with Dustin’s mom with her back to her interlocutor, a dramatic noir shadow over her angry face, but she just wants to talk to Dustin about clothes organization or whatever and not the murder of their mutual enemy, his hated father.

Blondie, 4/11/21

I kind of enjoy the fact that this strip sets up two delightfully bonkers scenarios — “Dagwood and Mr. Dithers go on a hellish business trip together” and “a big fat raccoon goes absolutely nuts in the Bumstead home” — without actually showing us any of the details of either. It allows our imagination to run wild with both, instead merely showing us the brief calm between these two storms.

Dennis the Menace, 4/11/21

Wait, what if this is true? What if Mr. Wilson really is happy most of the time and only gets grouchy when Dennis shows up, which just happens to be the only time we ever seen him? Guess we’d all owe him a big apology, huh? Ha ha, just kidding, we know Mr. Wilson rages about Dennis even when he’s absent, he’s not a happy man at all. And now that Dennis is just straight-up calling him by his first name, he’s gonna be even less happy! Enjoy suffocating on your own bile, you sour old coot!

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Oh, there’s an actual joke in Dennis the Menace today? Hadn’t noticed

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Dennis the Menace, 4/8/21

I’ve always thought Dennis’s affinity for Westerns, a genre very popular among children when this strip began and almost unknown to children today, says a lot about the suffocating layer of nostalgia piled atop this strip. However, today we get an intriguing hint that Dennis is actually watching revisionist neo-Westerns that try to grapple with the real social and historical backgrounds behind the myths, and whose heroes, turning to liquor in a futile attempt to numb the loneliness of the open range and the trauma of living in a violent frontier society, end up suffering from alcohol-induced psychosis — or, in cowboy patois, “scotch terrors.”

Blondie, 4/8/21

If DithersCo employs a full-time vending machine stocker rather than just hiring a service that stocks the machines for multiple businesses in the area like everyone else does, maybe Mr. Dithers ought to spend less time micromanaging Dagwood while he’s at work and more time thinking about some of their structural staffing costs. On the other hand, this arrangment may have arisen because there’s a single employee who’s responsible for the company’s unusually intense vending machine use, and replacing him with someone of similar talents but a lesser appetite will produce some real benefits for DithersCo’s bottom line.

Dick Tracy, 4/8/21

Say what you will about Dick Tracy, but if you want to see a guy in a suit stabbing a hippie in major newspapers, this comic strip is your only option.