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Daddy Daze, 7/7/26

One of my favorite aspects of The Shining, which is one of my favorite all-time movies, is that for most of the movie’s runtime it’s not clear whether the evil hotel ghosts are real or creations of Jack Nicholson’s increasingly deranged mind, until a point towards the end when they unlock the pantry where Shelley Duvall has managed to trap him. My experience with Daddy Daze is informed by a similar narrative tension: Is the Daddy Daze baby really communicating something with his “ba”s that only the Daddy Daze daddy can understand? Or is the Daddy Daze daddy merely projecting his own thoughts and concerns onto incoherent babble, possibly knowingly and possibly delusionally? Today, the Daddy Daze baby’s whimsical antics seem to have produced a real physical object, which implies that the Daddy Daze daddy isn’t so much mad as he is living in a mad universe.

Blondie, 7/7/26

Real joshreads dot com heads know that I enjoy what Blondie has to tell us about how old people are navigating the modern age. Remember when there only used to be three TV channels, and the weather gal on every channel told you it was the same temperature? Now there’s a million channels plus apps on your phone and what not, and everyone is talking about “Real Feel,” which is different from just the regular old temperature in some way that’s hard to understand. How’s a person supposed to stay tethered to actual, physical reality in this kind of information environment? I guess you should probably just go with what your boss says, right? He must know what he’s talking about, that’s why he’s the boss.

Dennis the Menace, 7/7/26

Damn, Dennis, it seems like your notorious antisocial behavior is starting to have an impact on your personal life! I guess the person you’re menacing the most is … yourself.

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Dennis the Menace, 6/30/26

I’m pretty sure Dennis is the one being menaced here, as he stares dumbly at Mrs. Wilson, who is half-watching what used to be her favorite show while simultaneously scrolling through a Facebook feed on her phone that’s increasingly dominated by bottom-tier brand posts and AI slop. Is it really true that “her stories” have degraded in quality? Or is it just that age, and the transformation of the media landscape, have rendered her less capable of enjoying the genre’s ludicrous twists and emotional highs and lows? Overall a real grim lesson for Dennis to take away from this visit, honestly. Still, I suppose he might be adding this pun to his own arsenal to unleash in a semi-menacing fashion on someone else. And let’s not neglect the fact that he’s drooling on himself. Engendering disgust in other people is a kind of menacing, I guess.

Dick Tracy, 6/30/26

The latest Dick Tracy storyline involves FBI Agent Fritz Ann Dietrich, who I guess I haven’t mentioned before but she’s a very occasional character whose main thing is that she’s always openly hitting on Sam Catchem (DIVERSITY WIN: this sex pest cop is also a lady!). Anyway, you might think that this box of “gaming machines” will be something interesting, but given that this is new-look nostalgia-obsessed Dick Tracy, it’s probably full of mechanical accessories for classic board games or something.

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Curtis, 6/20/26

As a longtime Wikipedia editor and aficionado of Wikipedia silliness, I enjoy it when I stumble upon evidence of a vicious long-ago battle between two editors on the wording of some article. For instance, when some fairly anodyne assertion has a ludicrous number of citations given to support it, that usually means that some editor who wanted that sentence in the article when someone else didn’t went nuclear to justify its inclusion. I bring this up because the article for Spielberg’s War of the Worlds calls it a “science-fiction action thriller film,” and supports that genre description with a footnote that contains seven subordinate footnotes backing it up. But is it a horror movie, maybe? The nationally syndicated newspaper comic strip Curtis calls it a “horror remake.” Maybe it’s time to open this discussion again. See ya out there in the marketplace of ideas!

Dennis the Menace, 6/20/26

I guess Henry is supposed to be sweaty and exhausted, but it really looks to me like he’s crying, possibly because it also really does not look to me that the Mitchells are in Disneyland, the actually trademarked happiest place on Earth. They lied to him and told him this obviously non-branded amusement park was Disneyland, but he can’t handle the deception anymore! He’s weeping because of the web of lies he’s spun for his only son!

Blondie, 6/20/26

Please, Elmo, ever since the Supreme Court’s decision in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, nobody cares about tariffs anymore. “Lemonade prices are spiking because so much of this year’s lemon crop has been unable to get through the Strait of Hormuz” is the new hotness!