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Folks, your comment of the week in a moment, but first: you might remember that a few days ago Blondie made a joke about Blondie’s long-ago roommate, which prompted me to muse about the strip’s early history. Well, faithful reader Mantipath managed to find a relevant Blondie strip from that era, in which Dagwood is about to marry said roommate (named “Irma,” apparently), but hasn’t shown up at the church yet because he’s all doped up on ether.

Blondie, 2/1/32

Truly, the past is a different country! A different country where there comic strips were printed larger in the paper and so had art that was a lot more detailed, also. Be sure to click/tap the image to make it bigger!

Meanwhile, here in the present, specifically in this week, we have this week’s comment of the week!

“Once, on a visit to the world-famous San Diego Zoo, I got to witness an angry confrontation between two Galapagos tortoises. Their furious visages, scarred faces, and hyperextended necks are perfectly replicated by Ashlee and Shauna in panel one. I will take the presence of the accompanying guttural groaning and hilarious slow-motion posturing as a given.” –Vice President John Adams

And your runners up! Very funny!

“I’m just relieved the joke wasn’t ‘Crankshaft is constipated.’” –a.

“I assume Ed’s tortured expression is because ‘crashing a vehicle containing mailboxes’ isn’t actually his schtick at all. This metaphor is flawed!” –Horace Broon

“Do you think Jeffy will mindlessly try and pledge his allegiance to anything with stripes? Have we ever seen him at the zoo?” –WLP

“Shauna proves right away that she’s a bad girl by being smoking hot right in front of a no smoking sign. Rules? Hmph. Rules are for good girls who return stuff they stole the day before.” –Weaselboy

“Skyler reacts with horror as he realizes his dementia stricken uncle has forgotten they can fly.” –nescio

“Good art can communicate deeper meaning with subtle visual cues. For example, Drew and Ashlee have matching colored shirts and her earrings coordinate with his entire ensemble, which causes the viewer to subconsciously connect the two of them as an in sync unit, united against this new threat. Shauna’s clothes, on the other hand, clash garishly against the gentle pastels of her environment, matching only the bright ‘no’ symbol in the prominent ‘no smoking’ sign. Ashlee is clearly a good match for Drew and can change and mature as a result of his good influence (he is an ‘influencer,’ remember), while Shauna is just trouble. It’s brilliant foreshadowing by the colorist, who uses… [touches earpiece] …sorry, this just in: apparently all of the food in Santa Royale is… beige? All of it? Really? Okay, wow. Never mind. Forget I said anything.” –The+Silent+Penultimate+Panel

“An interesting commentary on how pervasive capitalism is, to the point where we are unable to imagine relations of affections outside the concept of hierarchical workplace discipline imposed by the relations of productions… Oh sorry, it’s 1950s Dennis the Menace! I mean, wives be nagging!” –Ettorre

“You just can’t do a Zoom pizzeria. Sure, with a webcam you can see the discomfort on their faces as they choke down their third slice of grease and sawdust cheese, but no microphone is good enough to hear their stomach churning, and without the olfactory component of pizza burps and pizza farts, what’s the point? And when they run off to the bathroom, clutching their stomachs in agony, you can’t hear unmentionable fluids pour into an overtaxed toilet, you can’t smell waves of sickening odors flowing out from under the bathroom door. And that, my friends, is what Montoni’s is all about. So we’re reopening, and may God have mercy on our souls” –Voshkod

“I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a reference to an actual ‘bubbly blonde beauty’ that actually did flirt with Dagwood way back in the strip’s original incarnation 90+ years ago, even if that couldn’t have possibly happened that way given the state of the strip today. Sorry Dagwood, there’s no statute of limitations on memories in legacy strips; you bear the brunt of memories from well before you were born, and only the declining state of newspapers will keep them from remaining relevant well after you die.” –Morgan Wick

“I’ve never been conventially ‘hot’ before but even I know ‘Can you take a look at this rash and also have sex with me in that medical supply closet?’ is a shitty way to try and get back together with an ex.” –DevOpsDad

“Dermatitis? It looks to me like lycanthropy. So of course Shauna broke Drew’s heart. How else could she eat it, if not by smashing the breastbone first? Didn’t they teach you any anatomy at all at that medical school you bought your diploma from?” –seismic-2

“Serious question: Do backwards-cap wearers age out of it by the time they become pluggers, or will we eventually have a backwards-cap-wearing Andy Bear rolling his eyes at whatever science-fiction headdress tomorrow’s youth will be wearing?” –ArtOfWargames, on Twitter

“Are parents embarrassing? Does a bear shit on your posts?” –Pozzo

“The daily haul from the Periodical Bodega: $50. Cost of labor? $70. But sure I guess. Are the computers safe? I wrote that sentence without yawning so I’m impressed with myself. Scintillating stuff, Gil Thorp.” –Jerp+Jump

“I’ll be right over, babe, as soon as I finish this efficiency study. Can you imagine, that lazy cleaning crew insists that normal-sized mops are good enough!” –Peanut Gallery

“Normally the straight men in the comics have exaggerated reactions to the lamest of punchlines, but check out Dustin’s dad: absolutely no change in expression between panels one and three. Almost as if he isn’t paying attention at all. Hey asshole, if this stuff isn’t interesting to you what makes you think we’ll like it?” –pugfuggly

“Mr. Waverling plans to liquidate all of his assets and blow it all so that, being a cartoon poor person, he will have to wear a barrel instead of a suit. The idea of a mortician trying to fit him into a casket like that amuses him to no end.” –Tabby Lavalamp

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Slylock Fox, 6/16/21

A human can outrun all of these animals … over a short distance, yes. But what if the animals started thinking in the long term? What if they created their own society, and laws, and hired a fox detective who uses steely logic and will never give up in pursuit of his targets? This particular human is right to look scared at the prospect. He doesn’t know the true face of terror, not yet.

UPDATE: Ha ha, whooops, I misread this, apologies, I have been eaten by a bear

Mary Worth, 6/16/21

Sorry I talk so much about comic book time on here, but darn it, just keeps getting more and more relevant the more years I keep doing this blog, in which I talk about comic strip characters who never grow any older! A somewhat underdiscussed corollary of this phenomenon is that since said characters stay the same age, we have to assume that all the wild adventures we’ve watched them have take place when they’re that age, which is to say within a fairly compressed period of time. Take, for instance, Dr. Drew’s brief, ill-fated romance with his coworker Liza, which took place in 2011, or his even more ill-fated relationship with Dawn, which took place four years before that. Since everyone involved was the same age then as they are now, does that mean that, in the world of the strip, they all ended about a year ago, give or take? Did Shauna pickpocket her way into Drew’s heart before or after all that? Are we meant to understand that Drew and Shauna were engaged in hot, dysfunctional action somewhere in the background while we were forced to endure the endless Saul/Eve thing? Because that would be a true betrayal of the compact between reader and comics creator, in my opinion.

Blondie, 6/16/21

Speaking of comic book time, a thing that I like to occasionally dwell on is that in the origins of this strip, Blondie was a notorious flapper and Dagwood the heir to a family fortune who was slumming in the same scenes as her in the roaring ’20s, but he gave his inheritance up when he married her and since then they’ve slowly become generic middle-class suburbanites, their histories forgotten. I always think it’d be fun to call back to that now and then, though obviously due to the passage of time that specific history now no longer makes sense, so here’s my proposal for a reboot: occasional flashbacks to Blondie and Dagwood, drug-addled New York City club kids in the late ’80s/early ’90s, you’re welcome everybody. Oh, and Dagwood was fucking Blondie’s roommate behind her back, I guess.

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Blondie, 6/15/21

I continue to respect Blondie’s decision to acknowledge the coronavirus pandemic maybe once a month or so, but even with that context Dagwood is right to be confused: we have for the most part stopped doing temperature checks, because it turns out most people early in a coronavirus infection don’t have fevers, so it’s not a particularly good screen, plus Dagwood is coming home to his wife, who he lives with, and it’s not like he’s going to suddenly become infected and infectious in the eight hours he was at work anyway. Based on the narrative turn things seem to take in the final panel, I must regretfully come to the conclusion that this is a sex thing.

Dennis the Menace, 6/15/21

Why on earth would you ostentatiously refer to wife as “boss” so loudly and repeatedly during a phone call that your baffled coworker would interrupt your conversation to remark on it? I must again conclude this is some sort of sex thing, and Henry is attempting to humiliate himself in as many ways as possible during the run-up to the act itself, for sex-thing reasons.

Mary Worth, 6/15/21

Ha ha, wait, did Drew already fill in Ashlee on all the hot gossip vis-à-vis his ex, or do they already know each other somehow, or did their instincts just immediately kick in upon sighting one another and each of them realized she had to do battle to secure her position as the alpha skank? Anyway, I’m sure this is a sex thing for some of you, but please don’t feel obliged to leave the lurid details in the comments.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/15/21

I think we’re all real familiar with how depressing the average day is at Montoni’s for the people who hang out there, so dwell for a minute on the fact that its regular denizens found it even more depressing when the were forbidden to hang out there by the health department. Also, unrelated, but I dearly hope that the final panel isn’t a sex thing for anyone, anywhere.