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Daddy Daze, 8/15/21

When I first read this strip, I felt an immediate spike of anger when I got to panel four. “Damn it,” I thought. “It’s Superman for whom the ‘secret identity,’ Clark Kent, is the façade. Bruce Wayne is the real man and Batman is the persona. How dare they print this garbage in the newspaper!” But then I took a step back. Do I really care that much about superheroes? No, I do not. Have I actually given this subject that much thought? No, I have not, and upon reflection I may just be repeating sentiments from a David Carradine monologue in the 2003 Quentin Tarantino film Kill Bill. “Paul” or “Daddy” or whatever you want to call him is just a sad, lonely man projecting complex semantic meaning onto his infant son’s incoherent babbling, and who am I to criticize whatever coping mechanisms he feels are necessary?

Funky Winkerbean, 8/15/21

A fun thing to remember is that Mason was introduced during the first “let’s film Lisa’s Story” plotline, and at that point he was part of the empty-headed cadre of Hollywood ghouls who couldn’t possibly do justice to the sad story of Lisa dying of cancer. He later evolved into a “good guy” character, a transformation that climaxed him into agreeing to make the right kind of Lisa’s Story movie, but every once in a while the strip remembers “Oh, right, this guy is the sort of vapid movie star that a thoughtful person like Les would hold in contempt,” so despite being blown away by how good the rough cut of Lisa’s Story: A Mason Jarre Joint was, Les still gets to feel superior because Mason is doing social media content for his fans on Instagram, like a whore. Never mind that without those fans this terrible cancer movie wouldn’t have gotten the money to be made at all! Anyway, I like how Cayla seems genuinely dumbstruck to learn that someone might do something to make other people happy.

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Gil Thorp, 7/8/21

Oh, hey, the “spring” storyline in Gil Thorp is still going on [checks notes] several days after the 4th of July, but today’s strip would like you to know that you aren’t going crazy: it’s being deliberately dragged out by the library board, because they’ve discovered how great it is when people pay attention to them and they’re going to ride that high as long as they can. Anyway, it’s pretty clear from the neoliberal detente Zane and Abel achieved at their debate that the library board is going to announce that there’s no rule in the bylaws that would prevent them from appointing two new members. If there’s further conflict between the two, expect the rest of the board to live-stream the meetings in hope of recreating this magic springtime when everyone cared about library governance (it definitely won’t work).

Daddy Daze, 7/8/21

The whole gimmick of Daddy Daze is that the Daddy Daze baby speaks in an unintelligible series of “ba”s, which the Daddy Daze daddy purports to understand as a fully-fledged linguistic system that encodes complex ideas and concepts. I’m a fan of Occam’s Razor, the idea that simpler explanations are usually to be preferred to more complex ones, which may give you an idea of where I come down on the question of “is the Daddy Daze baby actually able to formulate complete sentences in a language of his own design despite his young age that his father understands, or is the Daddy Daze daddy merely in an advanced stage of psychosis?” Strips like today make the question substantially easier to answer, in my opinion.

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Mary Worth, 6/8/21

An important aspect of the Ashlee plot is that Ashlee didn’t just grow up with bad parents; she’s also currently poor and living in squalor. Her reaction today is an interesting twist, because it shows she literally just thinks Drew, as a rich doctor, has an infinite amount of money so it doesn’t matter if she steals stuff from him or not. Anyway, she’s about to learn the hard way that objects don’t just have monetary value: they also have emotional value, especially if they’re associated with your loving parents. Of course, Ashlee isn’t going to be able to relate to the concept of “loving parents” either, so maybe she’s just “Oh, no”-ing because she now realizes that Drew’s mom was also rich, but she died too soon for Ashlee to steal her stuff.

Daddy Daze, 6/8/21

Psst. Hey. Hey kid. They’re dancing around the question here but the answer is that they had sex with each other, and now it’s like a year and a half later and they’re broken up so it was probably wasn’t great!

Beetle Bailey, 6/8/21

The sad thing is that you can see how this could’ve very easily become a joke about NFTs, if anyone involved in Beetle Bailey knew what NFTs were. Instead, it’s taking on the hot concept of “copyrights,” which were the NFTs of the 18th century.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/8/21

One of my favorite villains from Doctor Who are the Silence, a creepy alien race who nobody can remember exists unless they’re actually looking at them. Anyway, even thought I gripe about Buck a lot on this blog, I promise he’s the equivalent of that, for me: unlike, say, every minor Mary Worth or Gil Thorp character, Buck occupies exactly zero of my brain cells when I’m not actively reading or writing about Rex Morgan, M.D. That’s not the case for the other Rex Morgan, M.D., characters, though. They apparently think about Buck all the time! He’s a constant, looming presence in their lives. Sounds real depressing, honestly. Welp, time to finish this sentence and then have exactly zero thoughts or opinions about Buck until tomorrow!

Curtis, 6/8/21

GOD DAMN IT CURTIS, STOP STEALING MY BIT