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Dustin, 4/1/23

Today’s Dustin is based on one of my least favorite (which is really saying something) running strip premises, which is that the supposedly young characters attempt to meet other young people for romantic reasons at fern bars where the guys all drink pint glasses of beer and the gals all drink wine, rather than by staring blankly at their phones and putting forth the minimum physical effort necessary to swipe in one direction or another for hours on end. But if we’re accepting this make-belive fantasy world, I approve of today’s strip, in which one of the aforementioned wine-drinking ladies decides that she’s going to make a move on the gents! You go, girl! I guess Dustin’s friend Fitch, whose whole characterization in the strip thus far has been “is stupid,” can now additionally be characterized as “is supposed to be reasonably attractive in-universe.” Obviously she leaves immediately once she get’s a whiff of their terrible personalities.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/1/23

Hootin’ Holler has long been completely isolated from mainstream civilization save for the occasional faint radio broadcast, so taking care to tend to the calendar and its associated set of holy days is a quite important task! Sadly, it’s yet another one that apparently only the women of this community are capable of performing.

Gil Thorp, 4/1/23

Oh, hey, I don’t think I mentioned this, but the Mudlarks have a disturbingly lifelike peacock mascot now, which I believe is a reference to a 2013 storyline where one of the kids thought a peacock he saw was a reincarnation of his dead brother that granted the team good luck, but it just ended up being a peacock that belonged to some guy. This honestly is fine, given that the bird sometimes called a mudlark is usually called a “magpie-lark” and is kind of boring-looking, and I guess we’re all too “PC” now to have a disgusting Victorian urchins looking for scraps of metal on the banks of the Thames to resell as a team mascot.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/1/23

“Sugar on a spoon?” Is this a song about heroin? Is Prof. Augustus Mirakle his dealer? Maybe the tales of Mud Mountain’s digestive distress aren’t finished yet.

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Dustin, 3/18/23

A fun fact is that Dustin premiered in January 2010, at the low point of the Great Recession, when unemployment was at nearly 10% and entry-level jobs that paid a living wage were extremely hard to find, which makes its central proposition — that young people who move back in with their parents because are lazy pieces of shit — all the crueler in retrospect. With unemployment now at about a third of that, things are a little different, but you can’t blame Dustin for keeping track of how the world changes around his eternal 24-and-underemployed situation to see what the vibes might be like to an outside observer.

Blondie, 3/18/23

On top of everything else, that’s clearly just a crossword puzzle. Dagwood has finally lost it, I regret to inform you all.

Family Circus, 3/18/23

You might think that the “best part” would be the opportunity to spend time with a beloved grandparent! You’d only think that if you hadn’t met her, though.

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Gasoline Alley, 2/28/23

One of the fascinating things about the current state of AI is that in science fiction, we imagined that robots would be able to dryly give ultra-correct answers to concrete questions but struggle with nuance, emotion, and (for some reason) contractions, while what we have today are chatbots like ChatGPT that will respond to your questions in fully idiomatic English paragraphs full of confidently delivered vague bullshitting and outright errors. Similarly, I think it’s funny that this is a strip with a talking bear that seems to be fluent in English but gets hung up on the idea that the bear might not understand some pretty basic idioms, when it should be focusing on laying the worldbuilding groundwork for the coming Human-Bear Wars, in which our ursine foes combine their massive strength with their newfound ability to communicate abstract concepts to one another to become an unstoppable fighting force.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/28/23

Remember, Snuffy only recently awakened his father from a Rip Van Winkle-seque sleep that lasted for who knows how many decades, so this punchline is literally true and very poignant. Pappy Smif is a man ripped out of his time! All his contemporaries are long dead, as is every detail of the world he thought he knew.

Dustin, 2/28/23

Hey, were you worried that Dustin’s parents don’t have much of a social life? Well, they do! It involves hanging out with other old people who also hate and resent their children.

Dennis the Menace, 2/28/23

Wait, is it supposed to be somehow menacing when Dennis reveals that his mother thoughtfully tidied up the house before company came over? What … what are we even doing here, guys.