Post Content

The Lockhorns, 4/22/21

As usual, I admire the craftsmanship that went into today’s Lockhorns. It would be easy to have the panel just consist of Loretta staring dead-eyed at the woman behind the counter, unsure if she’s making a little joke or issuing a serious warning or what, damn it, she just wants to sign up for a class and people seem to like Zumba, maybe some exercise would help pull her out of her decades-deep depression, why does everything have to be a comedy routine around here. But to have that going on in the foreground, while in the background, Leroy is thinking “Oh, ladies in leotards jumping rope and lifting weights in front of a huge window? Don’t mind if I do”? That’s how you know a real professional put this one together.

Dennis the Menace, 4/22/21

This is absolutely not Joey or Dennis’s house, right? Like, they probably don’t even know whose house this is?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/22/21

Weezy’s face in the final panel shows that she knows Snuffy is just joking. He may be generally averse to physical labor, but he never passes up an opportunity to dig a shallow grave for members of the hated Barlow clan who’ve died at Smif hands in the latest backwoods ambush! Plus he absolutely does not give a shit about the environment.

Post Content

Panel from The Lockhorns, 4/18/21

So … is Loretta over there audibly lying about her age to those women? Or is this just how Leroy strikes up conversations at parties? Honestly this shows an even looser grasp of social norms than all the times he ends up wearing a lampshade on his head and dancing with women three times his height.

Dennis the Menace, 4/18/21

It seems out of character for Dennis to be too scared to jump into the deep end of the pool, and it’s honestly pretty weird for him to climb up on the high board as he explains why he’s not planning on jumping off. There’s only one explanation I can come up with: he’s trying to really sell how scary the whole thing is so that nobody jumps off the diving board. Margaret’s obviously spent weeks getting more and more excited about all the social clout she’ll derive from this shindig, so ruining it even at the expense of his devil-may-care image is a truly menacing act on Dennis’s part. Look, it’s already working on Joey!

Post Content

Mark Trail, 4/17/21

You know, one thing I didn’t really like about the first plot of new-look Mark Trail was that it lacked truly cartoonishly hateable villain — yes, confronting the sins of one’s father has a long literary history, but you sort of knew that this was a complex relationship that would eventually, after a fashion, be healed. But a guy who used to go to high school with Mark, who’s real condescending to him and is now some kind of cricket-based protein powder impresario and social medial influencer? That’s a guy who we’re all hoping goes viral on Bikbok when Mark punches him in the face.

Blondie and Dennis the Menace, 4/7/21

I’ve always assumed that Blondie is going for a whole Dennis vs. Mr. Wilson vibe in its Dagwood and Elmo strips, and I have to say that it simply does not come anywhere close to it. There’s a real sense of animus there that Blondie’s anodyne amiability is simply incapable of capturing.

Pluggers, 4/7/21

I don’t usually praise the art in Pluggers, but I genuinely love the expression on kangaroo-lady’s face here. That is 100% the look of a woman who plans to file for divorce two weeks to the day after she gets her second vaccine dose, and has in fact taken any number of concrete steps to make that process go as quickly as possible.