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Beetle Bailey, 1/11/21

I refuse to believe that Beetle and Sarge are watching PBS or that Camp Swampy shells out for premium cable, so I’m left to assume that nobody at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC knows that you can pause streaming video.

Blondie, 1/11/21

“Did I think you looked goofy? Well, the two of us are, what, 40? 45? Not much older than that, surely, which means that when I saw you wearing bell-bottomed jeans it was the mid ’90s at the absolute earliest. So yes, I absolutely thought you looked goofy. Or wait, are you referring to JNCOs? Because those were exceptionally goofy.”

Pluggers, 1/11/21

Speaking of the shift of cultural signifiers over time, I feel like either Pluggers or I have absolutely lost the thread. Wearing shorts when there’s snow on the ground, usually on a day where it’s unseasonably pleasant but still “cold” by any objective standard, is something I associate strongly with my college days and therefore Gen X generally, which means that [checks Wikipedia for generally accepted dates for beginning of Generation X, subtracts from 2020] oh my GOD no, no, please, absolutely not

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Blondie, 1/7/21

Blondie and Dagwood have matching “best friends” in their next-door neighbors Herb and Tootsie; while Dag is occasionally seen interacting socially with others — his carpool, his coworkers, the guy at the bird store for some reason even though he never buys a bird — he doesn’t really seem to have any other deep friendships, the troubling case of Elmo really being in its own category. Blondie’s social circle is even more limited, as just about the only person we ever see her with outside her family is Tootsie, who is not only Blondie’s friend and neighbor but also her business partner, which seems like a lot of emotional labor to put on one person, frankly! Anyway, today we get a little glimpse into why Blondie and Tootsie only hang out with each other and not anybody else: they’re terrible people who love to cruelly exclude people for minor transgression but love vicious gossip even more.

Mary Worth, 1/7/21

“Jeez,” you’ve probably been thinking, “I know Mary Worth can be slow at times, but how are they going to wring drama out of a couple of old people going on a date to the mall?” Well, you owe me, King Features Syndicate, its parent corporation Hearst Communications, and really the entire Mary Worth-industrial complex an apology, as today the sight of a headless mannequin has triggered Eve’s deep post-hypnotic conditioning and prompted the traumatic emergence of her true identity: a ruthlessly efficient assassin for a shadowy international terrorist organization. (Her signature move was beheading people.)

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Blondie, 1/5/21

I regret to inform you that, mere days into 2021, I am back on my bullshit, and I think readers of this blog know me well enough to know that “figuring out how characters in legacy comics occupy and move through physical space” makes up a surprisingly large portion of my bullshit. Anyway, does Mr. Dithers not actually have his own office with a door? Does he just have a desk around … a corner from Dagwood’s workspace, presumably so he doesn’t have took at his worst employee’s dumb face but can hear him snoring and swoop into to pile on the abuse, if necessary? Or, other possibility: does he sometimes just spin around on his chair and scoot around the bullpen on it, as he appears to be doing here, dropping sick burns on his workforce while they’re within earshot before retreating back to the dignified, enclosed office area reserved for his use only?

The Phantom, 1/5/21

Hey, remember that time a lady cop and a waitress quit their dead-end (?) jobs to join the Jungle Patrol, Bangalla’s elite paramilitary force that takes orders from its “Unknown Commander,” the Phantom? This display of “girl power” was a bit undercut by the fact that every subsequent appearance of these two involved them projecting their fantasies on the Unknown Commander and getting extremely horny for him. Anyway, today they’re learning what happens when you commit yourself body and soul to the regime of an unaccountable superhero, which is that sometimes you have to go clean up the mess he left behind, possibly by murdering some dudes so he doesn’t have to.

Mary Worth, 1/5/21

Mary Worth knows that some of its readers might have found the previous storyline, which explicitly depicted the use of illegal narcotics, a little too thrilling, and so, in order to maintain everyone’s equilibrium, the first storyline in the new year will involve a senior gentleman asking a somewhat taller senior lady on a date to the mall (with like a week’s worth of cushion so we all have time to prepare ourselves, emotionally, to read about the date).