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Archive: Dustin

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Dustin’s been “halfway there” his whole life and will never get any further

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Mark Trail, 6/28/25

There’s a new Mark Trail adventure starting this week that appears to be about fairly straightforward environmental issues — poop in the swimming hole, I guess? — but I want to point out today’s strip because I love how tuff and mad about it Rusty’s little friend in the last panel looks. “Poop? In my swimming hole?” he thinks, striking a fierce pose that shows off his water wings. “Someone’s gonna get punched for this, I sure hope!”

Crankshaft, 6/28/25

Normally, if your dad returned from a trip to New York City singing a mangled version of one of the songs from the Broadway show he took in during his visit, that would be a good sign that he had a pretty good time. Not Crankshaft, though! We all know he’s incapable of joy. This just means that some sensory input got trapped in the malaprop center of his brain, irritating it — and, by extension, irritating him and everyone around him — further.

Dustin, 6/28/25

Ha ha, yes, Bon Jovi, the person who immediately comes to mind when a typical Zoomer like Dustin tries to summon up the name of a long-haired sex symbol! Now, it’s possible that Dustin picked Bon Jovi for this little rhetorical move specifically because he thought the man might appeal to his agèd mother, but keep in mind that (a) Slippery When Wet came out 39 years ago, so it’s fully possible for people with early-20s children to have been too young to get on the Bon Jovi train, and (b) Dustin obviously has never bothered to get to know his parents well enough to figure out what cultural figures from the past they might find attractive.

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Facial expression theater

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Dustin, 6/26/25

I really love the fact that Ed looks utterly joyless as he prepares to shove that forbidden donut down his donut hole. He doesn’t even want it, really; he’s just eating it to make some kind of point in his long-running battle with his wife that she’s never even going to find out about.

Pluggers, 6/26/25

This plugger, on the other hand, is gazing upon that expired can of beans with a keen expression of mingled trepidation and desire that borders on the erotic. Surely there are some risks worth taking, he thinks. Is botulism really such a terrible way to go out?

Hi and Lois, 6/26/25

Obviously Dot and Ditto did not enjoy Hi’s bedtime story, so I have to assume that the big smiles on their faces indicate that, in the moment just before they slipped off into unconsciousness, they realized that finally they weren’t going to have to listen to any more blather about fucking golf.

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Dads, but no grads

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Blondie, 6/15/25

The Blondie deep lore is that back in the ’20s, Blondie was a flapper girl and Dagwood was the dissolute son of a millionaire, and he was disinherited for marrying her, and that’s all of course long forgotten now and they’re just normal suburbanites, but it is a little weird that Dagwood’s boss looks suspiciously like his long-vanished father. It’s weird, right? I think it’s kind of weird. Anyway, it’s even weirder that this strip is drawing attention to it, though I’m not sure if the implication is that Dagwood sought out this abusive boss in particular to work out his daddy issues or if something much more complex and dark is going on here, a scenario in which Dagwood’s father has taken on a whole new identity that can never be acknowledged just so the two of them can spend time together.

Dustin, 6/15/25

Obviously, Ed was never going to spend Father’s Day with Dustin, whom he profoundly dislikes. But I appreciate that today’s strip reminds us that really his entire family is just a nonstop source of multilayered shame for him.

Hi and Lois, 6/15/25

Why are you subjecting Thirsty to all this, Hi? This is exactly the kind of thing he opted out of fatherhood to avoid!