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Dustin, 5/31/24

Look, I get — believe me, I get — that it’s hard to mine jokes every single day out of a single premise, and sometimes when you’re doing a daily newspaper strip, you need a mechanism by which you can say “OK, this admittedly bad joke I thought up/heard/read in an email forward is my punchline today, idgaf, it’ll be funny if I have a stupid person say it.” But if you have to have two of these mechanisms, like “Dustin’s stupid friend” and “the stupid people who call into Dustin’s mom’s radio show,” that says something about where you’re at and it isn’t great.

Hagar the Horrible, 5/31/24

You know I like to spend time figuring out the whole historico-political situation of Hagar the Horrible, so I want to point out the guy in the kilt in the foreground, which tells me this takes place in a time when the Norse were the elite of a multi-ethnic world along the edges of the North Atlantic and Baltic, and stretching from Iceland to the Black Sea, and inhabited by Celts and Slavs as well as Vikings. Also apparently their culture had a prominent place for the ritual of the “fuck tunnel,” but I don’t really know anything about that. Not an expert admittedly but I have no reason to doubt the cartoon.

Dennis the Menace, 5/31/24

These are both good-looking shirts! I imagine that one of the joys of doing a newspaper comic strip is that you can always decide “I’m gonna draw some nice shirts today” and it will brighten up someone’s day. Specifically mine! Consider my day brightened, Dennis the Menace creative team.

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Dustin, 5/25/24

Syndicated newspaper comic strip creators love golf for some accursed reason, but I have to say that they’re generally pretty good about only doing jokes about aspects of golf that non-golfers know about through cultural osmosis, like that you can lose your ball in a sand or water trap, or that everyone who plays it fucking hates it for some reason. Today’s Dustin, however, requires you to know whether 112 is a good or a bad score. I mean, I guess it’s clear from context that it’s bad, but still: I think this is over the line. It made me dedicate some thought to the awful “sport of kings” [note to self: wait, is that horse racing? double-check this] when all I wanted to do is find out what specific kind of terrible asshole Dustin’s dad was going to be today. Unacceptable! Save it for your side gig submitting New Yorker-style single-panel cartoons to Golf Digest, creeps!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/25/24

“Living their retro-diner-roots-country life to the fullest” makes it sound very much like we’re seeing some unpleasant rockabilly LARP situation, possibly in a corporate “immersive experience” theme park run by whatever hedge fund currently owns the rights to the Johnny Rockets IP. And that’s the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is that this is foreplay!

Family Circus, 5/25/24

Ah, man, this is great. Now I know that whenever we see Billy dressed up to play sports, he feels like he’s under a microscope and is miserable most of the time! I’m a major Billy hater as you all well know, so this is a big win for me.

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Blondie, 5/21/24

The implication here is that Dagwood has been home for hours while letting his latest workplace blunder marinate in his mind, only having the nerve to bring it up at the last possible moment. “What now?” says Blondie, who probably assumed that she had finished up all her emotional labor duties for the evening.

Dustin, 5/21/24

You know my contempt for the writing and characters in Dustin is boundless, but generally speaking, I think the art is decent. Like, even seeing Dustin’s dad’s boss from behind, I think the final panel here nicely captures a facial expression that says “Wow, I forgot what an asshole this guy is, hopefully he gets this all out of his system before our clients show up.”

Mary Worth, 5/21/24

Oh no, we’ve reached the point in the Mary Worth Plot Cycle where it becomes clear that the outrageous and silly plot prediction I made a few days ago (“Ha ha, what if Wilbur eats that fish“) might come true in a much, much grimmer fashion (“Oh no, Wilbur put his dead fish next to the ‘Phish food’ and all his frozen dinners, what if, blinded by grief and alcohol, he eats that fish”). It’s a real burden being cursed with the gift of prophecy!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/21/24

The implication here is that, despite the obviously impoverished circumstances of their household and community, young Jughaid and Tater have to yet experience a crisis in which scavenged local flora and fauna make their way into the Smif family skillet. We call that a Hootin’ Holler right of passage, kids, better get used to it!