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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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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.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/6/21

Sarah may have forgotten all her magical art skills due to her amnesia, but at least she still has the vague notion that artists use paint and brushes in their day-to-day work. Despite being a doctor’s daughter, the quotidian details of medicine are apparently unfamiliar to her. Doctors punch people, right? That’s how they get them to stop complaining about their various ailments? By knocking them unconscious with a fist to the jaw?

Mark Trail, 4/6/21

Over in Mark Trail, Mark’s offhand remark to Rusty that “crickets are land shrimp” went viral on Rusty’s TikTok BikBok, and so he’s flown to LA to do a hip-hop video with Reptiliannaire, a reptile-themed rapper. However, because I know a lot of people read Mark Trail for accurate information about flora and fauna, I find today’s strip irresponsible: I can assure you that you are not likely to step out of LAX and encounter an iguana in the backseat of the first car you enter in the “California reality.” (You will instead get into a Lyft that smells like weed.)

Mary Worth, 4/6/21

Hey, remember when Saul first showed up in Charterstone, and he was a rude jerk to everyone, and then then his dog died, and he was emotionally devastated, and also it turned out that many years ago his family forced him to give up his true love in order to marry someone else, and he literally fled in terror when Mary tried to get him to talk about his feelings, so eventually she just forced him to adopt a dog against his will? Well, he’s never been to therapy! What could he possibly gain from it? It’s for girls, mostly.

Blondie, 4/6/21

You ever look at some particularly weird character design choice in a legacy comic and think to yourself, “Enh, that’s just the ossified memory of some decades-old artistic style that sort of made sense in a former aesthetic and is too closely tied to the character to ditch now, it’s probably not worth thinking about.” Well, I regret to inform you that those design choices are very real and literal in the universe of the strip, and they make other characters in the strip horny. They are absolutely a sex thing. Huge apologies for breaking this to you like this, but I don’t believe in letting my readers live in a world of comforting lies.

Pluggers, 4/6/21

“Oh well,” you’re probably thinking after that one, “at least I don’t know much about pluggers’ peeing and pooping situation.” Well, I’ve got bad news on that front too.