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Daddy Daze, 12/17/21

Normally, I’m a big proponent of the “show, don’t tell” maxim in a visual medium like the comics, but you know what? I have zero interest in seeing twelve misshapen lumps of crumpled up newspaper stuffed inside baby clothes arranged in a circle in the middle of the floor while the Daddy Daze daddy crawls around them, interpreting his child’s incoherent babbling as Reginald Rose’s Emmy-winning dialogue. I don’t want to see that at all! I don’t even want to hear about it!

Beetle Bailey, 12/17/21

I was going to go on a riff here about how apparently we’re getting some psychological backstory on why Rocky is the way he is and ask who is that for, exactly, but then the question occurred to me: who is any of Beetle Bailey for, when you think about it? I mean I guess there are still people who jerk off to Miss Buxley, but I assume that’s a demographic that’s dying off pretty rapidly at this point. So sure, whatever, let’s get into the poverty-haunted home life that led to Rocky’s war crimes trial, might as well.

Crankshaft, 12/17/21

Ha ha, it’s funny because Crankshaft was playing Santa at Lillian’s store, but then he got drunk and passed out!

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Hi and Lois, 12/8/21

I’m reasonably sure we’ve never actually seen Trixie walking before? It’s 100% appropriate that this is the context in which she takes her first steps: just left alone in the middle of floor, with her parents nowhere to be seen and possibly not even in the house.

Crankshaft, 12/8/21

Man, wouldn’t it be great if this is how we found out that Crankshaft died? “Hey, we realized that your father hasn’t been a huge inconvenience and waste of first responder time and energy this year. Is something up with him?” “Oh, yeah, he died.” [starting tomorrow a tire ad is run in this spot on the comics page]

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Crankshaft, 12/6/21

Look, it’s not that I want to be a comics curmudgeon, all the time; sometimes it’s just important to me that comics do a better job of really zeroing in on the ideas they have instead of just running with the first iteration of a gag they come up with. So, like, with “Crankshaft is befuddled and angered by the modern world”: the thing where Ed’s favorite gardening catalog and then went out of business but got bought out by a blog or something is dumb and I don’t care for it. But Ed getting conned by a nootropics snake oil scam, which he presumably got wind of from a Facebook ad or an email forward, is definitely something I can get behind.

Blondie, 12/6/21

I think of Dagwood and Blondie as “old people,” to go along with the title of this post, because they were adults when I was a kid, but I guess they’re actually not old at all. They’re probably younger than I am now! Ha ha! Oh, life is so short and so fleeting! Anyway, if you’ve ever wondered what sort of sex stuff these two are into, it turns out it’s somehow both more banal and more distasteful than you could’ve imagined.