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Beetle Bailey, 3/31/22

Look, I have carefully curated my entire lifestyle so that I don’t have to know or care about the pop culture references or aesthetic sensibilities of anyone born after 2002. So it’s not entirely clear to me if the kids today are into ghastly backpacks that look like a nightmare version of human head with a zipped-up mouth, or if the brains behind Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC, who I assume have curated their lifestyles so that they don’t have to know or care about the pop culture references or aesthetic sensibilities of anyone born after 1964, just assume that this is a thing the kids today are into. Either way, I don’t care for it.

Dick Tracy, 3/31/22

Every time we’ve seen a performance from Vitamin’s new talent who parodies Tonsils, a cacophonic singer who almost killed Dick Tracy, he’s drawn with his arms like that. He’s not supposed to have six arms (you have to clarify these things with Dick Tracy, though if the did have six arms he’d be named something like “Sixarm” or “Armsix”), so I guess it’s supposed to represent a gesture of some sort, and this other lady is doing it too, now, so: fine, I’ll ask. What is it. What’s the gesture. Is it a jerk-off motion. Is “oh the rainbow turned muddy” some kind of code for masturbation that I’m unfamiliar with. I’m almost as grumpy as Dick is here.

Crankshaft, 3/31/22

Look, I don’t care if Crankshaft dies because he didn’t take his pills, or because he took too many of his pills. I just want him dead. It honestly doesn’t really even need to be pill related.

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Blondie, 3/28/22

I honestly kind of respect how Blondie is just absolutely committed to doing jokes about whatever big pan-cultural event is on the calendar, and in a way that doesn’t engage with the specifics of said event at all, instead just acknowledging that it exists at an extremely surface level, so that the jokes could theoretically be reused for years to come (though amazingly I’m pretty sure they never are). The cultural net is pretty wide, too, and I’m not sure if that’s meant to make sure that there’s a little something for all the Blondie-heads — “the folks who weren’t into our generic March Madness gags last week will surely appreciate the generic Oscar gags this week” — or if the Blondie creative team truly believes that almost everyone has a certain amount of interest in a core set of cultural touchstones. If it’s the latter, they’re probably the last real idealists left in America.

Anyway, I do wonder about the creative process that led from “how can we cash in on America’s Oscar fever” to the punchline “he just gave it … 3 flames up!” It seems clear that this is a reference to the thumbs up/thumbs down movie-rating metrics made famous by Siskel & Ebert 30 years ago, which is an acceptable cultural horizon for Blondie readers, no argument there. And flames instead of thumbs, sure, because of the comical exaggerated flames coming out of Dagwood’s mouth. But why three? Because if two is good, then three is better? Have they forgotten that the origin of the system was two movie critics who either agreed or disagreed, and now they’re simply treating it like a simple star rating scale? I have to say I’m pretty disappointed in this one.

Dennis the Menace, 3/28/22

Dennis, you’re … you’re looking at the TV right now! You know what he’s watching! Are you precisely attuned to Mr. Wilson’s emotional state and know what in his media diet triggers him, but can’t tell the difference between sports being played and the news being reported? Because that’s profoundly menacing, and not in a good way.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/28/22

Oh no, Rene’s got to go on the lam again before Raymond (?) hears the news! And just when he finally figured out a way to make money legitimately (selling high-quality oil paintings to foot fetishists).

Crankshaft, 3/28/22

I’m very excited for Crankshaft to become a hard-core anti-pharma “natural living” influencer guy, mostly because I assume he’ll be dead by the end of the week due to his various untreated ailments.

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Six Chix, 3/23/22

One of those things that I never thought about until I learned it and then I thought about it all the time is that nowhere in the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme is it stated that he’s an egg, yet this is, universally, how we envision him. The main theory explaining this is that the rhyme was originally conceived of as a riddle: “humpty dumpty” was a general slang term of abuse for the short and squat, and so the joke was something like “Sure, seems weird that some little fat dude fell off the wall and broke into pieces … but what if we told you that actually, he was an egg? Eh?” Humor, notoriously, does not translate well across eras, and this is a pretty good example of that in play! You know what does play well across eras, though? Body horror! That’s why I’m wholeheartedly endorsing the Six Chix reboot of the Humpty Dumpty mythos, in which the Humpty Dumpty was deliberately taunted into hurling himself to a horrifying death so that his “inner bird” could be set free. Each bird in this grim world must convince other beings to die in order to perpetuate their species. It’s grim stuff!

Crankshaft, 3/23/22

If you “run” Montoni’s pizza through “the pipeline” (of your digestive tract), you’ll experience any number of unpleasant side effects, at both ends and the middle, which might in some sense be interpreted as “saluting”. Sorry you had to visualize that, but the motto of this blog long ago shifted from “I read the comics so you don’t have to” to “I involuntarily contemplated Ed Crankshaft’s pizza-farts so now you’re going to have to as well.”

Gil Thorp, 3/23/22

I know, in theory, that the teens in the first two panels have just finished a practice, and it’s only in the second panel that we’ve zoomed in enough to see that Parnit is sweating as one normally does after such exertion. But what it looks like is that Pranit has been told that he’ll be allowed back in the lineup after being suspended for his little “I accidentally became a bookie and hired an enforcer” oopsie and has immediately broken into a frenzied, manic sweat of excitement. He might have a problem not messing up between now and the game! Looks like he’s gonna mess up right there, to be honest!

Judge Parker and The Phantom, 3/23/22

Sorry I have not been keeping you up to date on Judge Parker and The Phantom, but I did want to point out that they’re both drawn by Mike Manley but written by two different people, and I would like to imagine that Manley enjoyed getting the scripts this week and finding out that he would get to do two explosions on the same day.