Post Content

Dustin, 6/24/23

Being a diagnosable Twitter addict, like I am, is not particularly rewarding, but it does provide you with a few fairly useless special powers. The ranks of Twitter addicts are fairly small — the number of daily users has never matched networks like Facebook or Instagram or TikTok — but is disproportionally made up of journalists and academics and tech “thought leaders,” so ideas and memes that originate on Twitter often eventually leak out into the real, non-Twitter, world, so one of those aforementioned useless powers is the ability to spot one of the aforementioned ideas/memes and think “Oh, no, this bastard is inflicting a bad Twitter thing on the hapless normies.” For a while, one of the bad Twitter things has been accounts that post pictures of Eastern European models in various contrived everyday situations accompanied with text like “You encounter this beautiful woman in the market. What is your romantic approach?” The goal for these accounts is either to push pickup artist bullshit or just get enough followers so that they can eventually pivot to crypto scam artistry, and I regret to inform you that it appears that at least someone at Dustin HQ has been sucked in.

Dick Tracy, 6/24/23

Dick Tracy hasn’t gone in for nightmarish ultraviolence in years, but current the creative team still likes to unsettle and disturb in their own way, like by offering unpleasant closeups of normal human mouths in action.

Hi and Lois, 6/24/23

This is a good addition to my “Hi and Lois is embracing Thirsty’s characterization as the neighborhood drunk” files. Honestly, the combination of the bright red nose and the fact that he’s clearly passed out in his lawn chair with his mouth hanging open while children gawk at him is a little too much! Getting a little grim! Might want to ratchet it back!

Judge Parker, 6/24/23

Good news, everyone! Sam and Abbey are going off on a trip together to have sex! Sam’s wearing a dumb baseball hat and they almost-matched their ecru shirts because that’s the sort of bland shit that really gets them going, I guess. Hopefully we’ll be treated to the same uncanny flavor of sexuality that marked their last recorded erotic encounter.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/24/23

“Oh, wow, you’ve managed to parry exactly one question with a confident but unquantified assertion. I’m sold!”

Post Content

Hagar the Horrible, 6/13/23

Look, it’s fun when I do jokes about how Hagar the Horrible, as a Viking warrior chieftain, would realistically be responsible for an endless list of violent horrors perpetrated as he and his band pillage their way across the North Atlantic. But when the strip itself explicitly does a joke that makes it clear that Hagar’s own clothes are canonically drenched in the blood of the Anglo-Saxon soldiers, villagers, and monks who stood in the way of his rapacious greed, I have to say I find it a little off-putting.

Dennis the Menace, 6/13/23

OK, today’s Dennis the Menace gets ten points for acknowledging that even someone of Mr. Wilson’s advanced age is fairly likely to have been using computers for decades now. However, I must subtract several thousand points for the ongoing attempt to turn Dennis the Menace into Mr. Wilson’s Technological Gripes, which, no matter how ambivalent my opinion about Dennis and his menacing quality might be, I feel honor-bound to resist at all costs.

Dustin, 6/13/23

Do you think that the members of Dustin’s family are emotionally stunted nightmare people because they never receive any affection from one another? Or do they all (correctly) perceive each other as unlovable, emotionally stunted nightmare people and that’s why they never express any affection? Discuss.

Post Content

Dustin, 6/9/23

Under The Skin is a truly great and unsettlingly weird movie that is, probably, about an alien who’s been sent to Earth to capture and harvest human beings for food. I say “probably” because that’s what the book it’s based on is about, but the movie is quite different in a number of particulars and what’s happening in it is never spelled out for you. Scarlett Johansson is the main character, and is definitely not human, and as she wanders around Glasgow, seductively luring men back to a house where they get submerged into some kind of liquid void, you see everything more or less from her perspective, which makes human society seem alien as she tries to understand and navigate it. I’m not going to give away the rest of it, as you should watch it and it’s free to stream on Kanopy, a service you can access with your public library card, but yes, Johansson does get naked in it, and in the context of the movie it is ultimately profoundly unerotic. Anyway, I love it a lot, obviously, and it has kind of a cult following but very few people actually saw it, which makes it a bizarre thing to build a comic strip punchline around, so I assume that today’s Dustin has Dustin’s dad, possibly my least favorite character in all of present-day syndicated newspaper comics, say all this as an attack on me personally. (I’m joking, of course: I actually assume this strip is a result of someone discovering that there was only a single movie in Scarlett Johansson’s filmography in which she appears nude, which resulted in an anticipated masturbatory session that went terribly wrong.)

Gil Thorp, 6/9/23

You have to respect Marty Moon: he could’ve just texted Gil those pics he took of the Mudlarks doing vape crime (the dorkiest kind of crime there is), but he went to the trouble of getting them printed out so he could flash them in Gil’s face in person before throwing them down on his desk. This is just proof that you don’t spend a lifetime covering high school sports without learning a little something about drama.