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Family Circus, 3/9/21

In the interests of fairness and integrity, I will always admit it when a day’s Family Circus is one of the good ones, and folks … today is one of those days. My favorite thing here is the way that Billy is resting his arm on the couch; I suppose the intention is that he’s indicating the couch on which he’s offering to sleep, but I’d like to think that he’s actually so stunned by this bowl of candy, just left out there at a grabbing height, where anyone can get at it, that he’s staggered backwards and needs to hold himself up. If he can just maintain his composure until everyone goes to sleep, he can shove all of that candy down his gullet and then spend the night staring at the ceiling in the grips of the most delightful sugar mania.

Daddy Daze, 3/9/21

This Daddy Daze is also pretty good, to be honest. I’m still not convinced one way or the other on whether or not the Daddy Daze baby’s “ba”s represent real linguistic content, but that’s irrelevant to the fact that the Daddy Daze daddy has lost steam halfway through the process of putting on his shirt and is now just standing there with it covering his face, contemplating the fact that all of us are really just 100 pounds or so of rotting meat hanging off of our skeletons.

Dennis the Menace, 3/9/21

The best thing about this Dennis the Menace is that dinner at the Mitchell house tonight is that lumpy brown slurry that’s a comics visual shorthand for “Haw haw, wives/moms sure can’t cook, amiright fellas?” Not sure what Alice has added to it in order to make it palatable to her son this time — tons of sugar, or maybe alcohol?

Shoe, 3/9/21

“Look, I’m dying. I know I’m dying! I just don’t want to hear about it every time I go get the prescription for my boner pills renewed.”

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Dennis the Menace, 2/12/22

This is in reality an extremely egregious example of working backwards from a punchline to a joke, without putting much effort in trying to figure out how to make the backstory work logically, but damn it, now I’m trying to figure out the backstory behind a guy receiving an epiphany from the Lord above at a church and then switching to another church. I’m imagining the heavens opening and a divine voice informing Mr. Wilson that his current denomination, the General Six-Principle Baptists, were heretics, as were the General Association of Baptists, the General Association of General Baptists, and the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, and only the General Conference of the Evangelical Baptist Church carried the true faith.

Mark Trail, 2/12/22

You know, I remember a time when Rusty would be over the moon just to be allowed to go on a trip with Mark and Cherry, and would certainly not plan on killing a cryptid for social media fame without their permission. I guess it’s true that the only way to raise a respectful ward son is to keep him in a “Rusty coop” out back 350 days a year. Parents these days are going soft, and it’s the source of nothing but trouble!

Pluggers, 2/12/22

I think a lot about a story a friend once told me about a Bay Area Vietnamese restaurant that was famous for serving fake but very convincing meat in its dishes. Once my friend was eating there and a guy came in and started berating the owner, who always was out and about serving as host, about how even though they weren’t serving meat they were still promoting meat culture, which is a culture of death. The owner listened to his whole diatribe stone-faced and finally just replied, “Look, we’re Buddhists, we like pork but we can’t eat it.” Anyway, after seeing this panel, I’m going to spend my weekend working on “horseshoe theory, but for pluggers.”

Dick Tracy, 2/12/22

This doesn’t actually have anything to do with the Moran case directly; Dick just knows that the best way to loosen up and get his head “into the zone” as we go into the weekend is to hunt a PR guy for sport.

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Blondie, 2/10/22

One thing that Blondie absolutely loves doing is to mine broadly appealing cultural events like “the Big Game” for laughs in the most generic way possible, without getting into specifics like what team Dagwood roots for or violating sacred NFL trademarks. Anyway, it’s really too bad that so much of the joke-space of today’s strip is dedicated to that sort of weaksauce bullshit, because I am frankly quite intrigued by the way Dagwood has clearly become extremely and erotically fixated on the forbidden chili in the final panel.

Gil Thorp, 2/10/22

Gil Thorp has somehow made its teen gambling plot, in which Pranit is using his brother’s sportsduke dot com account to accidentally become a bookie, boring, so the girl’s plot is going to have to veer into more traditional troubled youth territory. Are you telling me that some high school seniors at a party might’ve had a third of a can of hard seltzer apiece? Watch out, everybody, we got a new Euphoria on the funny pages today!

Dennis the Menace, 2/10/22

Honestly, you have to really admire that the Mitchells are so dedicated to high culture that they keep coming to this fancy restaurant with a black tie dress code even though Dennis ruins the experience so consistently that the wait staff knows their name. Dennis is never going to be snooty like you, Henry! It’s just not going to happen!