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The Lockhorns and Blondie, 1/11/24

The word app, as a shorthand for application in the computer programming sense, was as attested as early as 1992, which was 32 years ago. However, it probably didn’t really penetrate into the public consciousness until the dawn of the smartphone age, when Apple started using it to describe the small, self-contained applications running on its new iPhone platform and sold through its App Store, launched in 2008; by 2010, the term was used freely by iPhone and Android users alike, and had become so prevalent that it was the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year. This was 13 years ago, which, I regret to inform you, is quite a long time, actually, and the window for doing a strip where the punchline is just the word “app” has long closed. Comics creators: please make a note of this.

Gil Thorp, 1/11/24

How do you think Marty Moon’s recovery journey is going? It seems that he’s reached that long plateau, where a dry life extends endlessly before him and, while he’s not in immediate risk of backsliding, it’s hard to shake off the lethargy and emotional numbness. Oh, it’s in from midrange. Oh, Leo Atazhoon is going to be interviewed on the podcast. Ho hum. Nothing exclamation point-worthy. Look at these young men celebrating. Marty used to be like that once. Marty used to feel things. This strip needs to do right by our boy Moon and give him a wild and wacky subplot, something that’ll get him to snap out of it!

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/3/24

Sure, we’re being told that this crowd is CLAP! CLAP! CLAP!ing in big red letters, but by their faces, they don’t look that enraptured, do they? This makes sense because honestly, the audience for a self-help group/cult tour making its second pass through a smallish city would logically be mostly made up of (a) people who had already bought into the cult idea and are now unsettled to learn that the cult has a new leader and (b) people who only came in the hopes that Mud would play “Muddy Boots” and, like, who cares if this cult has just undergone a leadership reshuffle, really? Is that going to make them play “Muddy Boots” any sooner? Because frankly they’re just talking a lot about who really founded the cult and that can only push “Muddy Boots” time further back.

Family Circus, 1/3/24

I genuinely love how haunted both Jeffy and Grandma look here. Grandma obviously is really wounded that the kids just walked out in the middle of some story that was obviously quite meaningful to her, possibly about her beloved husband, the grandfather they never knew. Jeffy, meanwhile, is thinking “World exist before Jeffy? This mean teddy bear still exist when under blanket and Jeffy can’t see???”

Blondie, 1/3/24

I also genuinely love the Red Bull empties on Dagwood’s desk. He tried! He really tried! But if he can stay rail-thin despite his shockingly inhuman food consumption habits, you’d better believe that a few thousand milligrams of caffeine and taurine aren’t going to be enough to keep his synapses firing.

Shoe, 1/3/24

I will admit that this is a perfectly serviceable bit of wordplay, but I do want to point out that they give this lefty-loving bird lady a headband, because only a dirty hippie would ever date a socialist! Just to drive the point home, Roz is using the red flag of world revolution to wipe the crumbs off her counter.

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The Lockhorns, 12/23/23

Usually a crinkly smile on Leroy means that he’s in the midst of being dramatically drunk, but I’m not quite sure what vibe he’s supposed to be giving off here. Maybe it’s something like “Yeah, that’s right, we argue. We argue a lot. It gets us all revved up. So you two wanna swing or what?”

Slylock Fox, 12/23/23

Turns out the Forest Kingdom has some kind of Henchman Christmas Party where Max and Count Weirdly’s little genetic experiments get to hang out and exchange gifts! In an ideal world, they’d also be plotting to rise up against their respective masters and seize control of the world for themselves, but that would require a level of class consciousness and basic competence that none of them have ever demonstrated.

Blondie, 12/23/23

“Ha ha, self-checkout machines! They sure, uh, exist, right? The modern world, whaddya gonna do! Well, that’s a joke, probably, time to go play golf.” –the Blondie brain trust, it seems