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Slylock Fox, 3/15/21

I’ll save you the trouble of flipping your monitor upside-down and reveal the answer to today’s mystery: Slylock checked Weirdly’s pulse, revealing that his heart was beating at a normal rate and he couldn’t possibly have just finished up some vigorous jogging — and, of course, under Forest Law, invalidating an alibi is the same thing as proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But the real tragedy here isn’t the usual miscarriage of justice, and it isn’t some lightly singed fur. It’s that Count Weirdly no longer gets a thrill out of his sinister laser-based pranks, or even from doing a quick change into absurd-looking “jogging” gear into to avoid punishment. His usual antics leave him feeling nothing, just dead inside. Maybe he does need some time alone in jail — not as punishment for his mostly harmless “crimes,” but for some self-reflection about what might really get his heart pumping again.

Blondie, 3/15/21

Speaking of people for whom the thrill is gone, I’m not going to say that dressing up in Roman garb and shouting “I am Julius Caesar!” on March 15 is the most obvious way to tell the world that you’re sick of living and want someone else to end it all for you, but it’s got to be reasonably high on the list.

Dustin, 3/15/21

Oh, man, if you’ve grown tired of the endless Boomer vs. Millennial (or, fine, Gen X vs. Zoomer) warfare in Dustin, how about we spice things up by adding Dustin’s dad’s (let’s say) Silent Generation-era dad to the mix! The important question for figuring out the dynamic: Is he an asshole too? All signs point to yes!

Crankshaft, 3/15/21

I sincerely hope that several hours have passed between the second and third panel here. Maybe even a whole day!

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Dick Tracy, 2/24/21

A little sniff before she fixes dinner, if you follow her. If you get her drift. Her snow drift. She’s talking about cocaine! I feel like what with all the weird escapades with “Pouch” and his stolen balloon “Blue” that this strip has been going on for the past several weeks, we’ve lost sight of the true star of this storyline: cocaine, and the recreational consumption and illegal distribution thereof.

Blondie, 2/24/21

Look, obviously the Blondie strips where she’s taking notes on the “[Insert Profession/Hobbyist Group To Make Jokes About Here] Group Luncheon” are just excuses to make some easy jokes riffing on widely accepted stereotypes about the profession or hobbyist group in question, and that’s a perfectly valid joke template for a long-running legacy strip like Blondie to have. I’m just saying, though, you really should have your stereotypes correct if you’re going down this road. Like, when I see someone with a sweater tied around their neck like this, I think “leader of the rich kid camp across the lake about to challenge our protagonists to a snobs vs. slobs battle in an ’80s comedy,” not “theater kid.”

Dustin, 2/24/21

I get that this is supposed to be a joke where an adult tells a child about how things used to be, but: Dustin is canonically supposed to be boomerang kid who came home from college and never left, and his younger sister is still in high school, so I don’t think we’re supposed to think of him as much past his mid 20s, meaning he was born in the mid-to-late ’90s; meanwhile, Facebook opened to the general public in 2006 and surpassed MySpace as the most heavily used social networking site in 2008, so “likes” have been a social currency for basically his entire life. On the other hand, Hayden, age seven, probably doesn’t use social media at all and when he starts it will be on some app whose feedback mechanisms are entirely strange and foreign to the rest of us. What I’m trying to say is, if you’re doing an entire strip about generation gaps, you at least need to know what various generations are into.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/24/21

“I think I basically get the urge to have a place where you sleep indoors and spend time when you’re not at work. But why would you want that place to be nice?”

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Blondie, 1/20/21

Much as I would like to live in a world where, even in bland suburban communities like the one where the Bumsteads live, there are standalone storefronts that cater entirely to readers of niche publications like Vinyl and Fish and Giants Fan, I feel I must point out that even full-service bookstores are having a hard time staying afloat in the age of Amazon, so I am forced to describe the setting of today’s Blondie as “wholly unrealistic.” I’m trying to imagine the sequence of decisions that led to the creation of today’s strip, and while it makes sense that the writer of a legacy newspaper strip would imagine a paradise where print media still ruled, I think it’s more likely that they came up with a magazine joke first and were trying to figure out where to set it and thought “magazine … store?” and decided to call it a day at that point.

Dennis the Menace, 1/20/21

Gina has long been one of the less interesting characters in Dennis the Menace, since her whole deal seems to be “a girl, but less annoying than Margaret.” But she’s certainly shot to the top of the menacing charts with her new project, the Neighborhood Racial Purity Census.

Hi and Lois, 1/20/21

Dawg’s dead, everyone. Dawg’s dead and he’s in heaven now. Pour one out for Dawg, the beloved dog character from the syndicated newspaper comic Hi and Lois!