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Blondie, 10/30/20

Look, I’m on the record as saying that I don’t actually care that Blondie intermittently acknowledges the coronavirus pandemic, sometimes doing bits with Dagwood working at home but more often than not just ignoring the whole thing and having his white collar commuter life continue on as usual. And that’s fine, because Blondie takes place in a nebulously eternal present and has no continuous “storylines” so it doesn’t bother me even if they’re inconsistent about it day to day. But I refuse to accept an instance where DithersCo LLC’s work-at-home situation suddenly changes in mid-strip, especially when said strip is clearly not in March 2020, but rather sometime in late October.

Dick Tracy, 10/30/20

I’m honestly quite in favor of Dick Tracy lifting Little Orphan Annie and Brenda Starr from their cancelled strips, dropping them into its plotlines, and essentially turning itself into the Tribute Content Agency Cinematic Universe. Now, do I support the implication of the odd silent final panel here — that the beloved Annie herself is a vampire, or at least vamp-curious? I guess I’m willing to wait and see exactly where this goes before weighing in.

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Funky Winkerbean, 10/25/20

OK, so, just to make sure we have the sequence clear, these ICE dudes arrested Adeela (who, just to emphasize, is in the United States legally) due to a bureaucratic fuckup (one that didn’t make a ton of narrative sense, but still), fast-tracked her for near-immediate deportation, resisted any attempt by her lawyer to make them re-examine the dodgy evidence that led them to their decision, and released her not because they realized they were wrong or because they reassessed their obviously broken internal processes, but because of political intervention at the highest levels. But anyway, they’re returning the Montoni’s bag, so they’re good now! No hard feelings, right? [Backslapping and laughter all around]

Daddy Daze, 10/25/20

Wow, the Daddy Daze daddy’s goth friend sure is getting extra goth today, isn’t he, moaning about how parenting makes time stretch on infinitely, such that we’re all either rapidly aging or cursed with eternal life or maybe both. Anyway, it absolutely makes sense that the Daddy Daze daddy has chosen to sit several seats away from him.

Blondie, 10/25/20

Not to brag or anything, but if I wanted to spend an evening out with a pal and possibly get home long after my wife went to sleep, I would just tell her that’s what I had planned, and if that made her uncomfortable in some way, we’d have an open and honest discussion about it. Maybe that’s weird, maybe the rest of you are all promising your spouses you’ll be home by 1 am and coming home at 3 am and getting in trouble for it, I dunno, but you know what’s a hell of a lot weirder? Dagwood thinking that only wearing his undershirt makes him quieter, somehow.

Baby Blues, 10/25/20

It’s also never occurred to me to casually ask my wife “Hey, babe, you ever fuck Spider-Man?” so maybe I just need to admit that everyone’s marriage is unique and none of us have any real idea what anybody else is doing.

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Blondie, 10/2/20

One of Blondie’s less pleasant running bits is about how most poor people are scam artists, actually, and I feel like today’s strip started out as being a variation on that but somehow become something much, much weirder. This dude isn’t drawn as the typical long-haired scruffy Blondie panhandler; he’s just a regular guy with normal clothes, a respectable haircut, an unsettlingly piercing gaze, and a desire to engage with you about the professional upkeep on his toes. The fact that he’s actually wearing closed-toed shoes makes the whole interaction even more off-putting for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, maybe because the strip is demanding we think about this guy’s feet but isn’t showing them to us so we need to use our imaginations.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/2/20

Well, it seems what “does it” for Buck and Mindy, sexually, is when things more or less work out for the best without anyone having to really do all that much, so I have some good news for them about the comic strip they currently inhabit.