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Dustin, 11/5/24

The thing about Dustin is that it’s a perfect machine of hateability, in the sense that there isn’t a single recurring character that I have any real warm feelings for. Dustin’s sister Meg in some ways escapes my ire the most, because she has very little in terms of revealed personality and exists only to make rude comments about her brother and parents and occasionally be reprimanded for dressing too slutty. Today, however, we learn that her misanthropic attitude extends beyond her family to the human race at large, and frankly I would love to learn more about Doomer Goth Meg in future installments of this strip.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/5/24

A sobering discovery of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is that, in many places that embraced electoral democracy, it functions less as a way for wise or efficacious policies and ideas to be debated and endorsed by the citizen body, and more as a head-counting exercise: different interest groups within a society, many of them ethnic- or clan-based, use the vote as a means to assert their numbers and power rather than to win in the marketplace of ideas. While this might not be what the Enlightenment philosophers and America’s founding fathers had in mind, you have to admit that the Smifs and the Barlows taunting each other by means of “I Voted” buttons is preferable to their usual means of settling disputes (murdering one another with antique rifles and whatever other makeshift weapons they can lay their hands on).

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Dustin, 9/9/24

Deckhand on an Alaskan crab boat.
Choker setter for a logging crew.
Apprentice roofer.

C’mon, Dustin—get it over with.

Dick Tracy, 9/9/24

Sure, Ro-Zan is dangerous but Thorin, with his desperation at Moon Valley losing its atmosphere, known antipathy to Terrans, and blatant disregard for human rights, is no saint either—and he’s headed your way, Diet. Don’t forget, “the nation that controls magnetism will control the universe,” and said nation is emphatically not yours.

Hi and Lois, 9/9/24

Hi will both mash his thumb and pulverize the precious Oxy he’ll need for the pain. Ditto will tell him he can still snort it, but he has to pick out the plastic fragments first. Hi will ignore him—he’s in a hurry, dammit—and maybe he can hassle the E.R. docs for more Oxy to ease the pain from his nosebleed.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/9/24

Truck sits and ponders his answer: “Am I Truck Tyler? Used to be, kid; used to be ….”

—Uncle Lumpy

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Dustin, 7/29/24

Absolutely one of the most heartbreaking things about Dustin is that Dustin’s dad is a cruel asshole who will never love his son, and Dustin is a contemptible slacker who will never get his life together in a way that might cause his father to feel a shred of affection for him, but Dustin still wants his father to love him. Look at his face in that first panel: he knows that he’s figured out how to get his father to talk shit about some imaginary stupid young people who exist in his mind, rather than about his actual son, to his son’s face.

Hi and Lois, 7/29/24

The LIBERAL COMMUNISTS at PBS want you to spend your 6 o’clock hour like Hi in panel two: getting Ludovico techniqued from watching 60 uninterrupted minutes of war crimes. But your patriotic friends at the commercial networks know what you really want: 41 minutes of actionable News You Can Use and 19 minutes of ads for new breakthrough pharmaceutical products to ask your doctor about, which are also a kind of news you can use, if you think about it!

Family Circus, 7/29/24

Ha ha, YES Jeffy, you’ve got him dead to rights for unpatriotic thoughtcrime, time to have him sent to the reeducation camps and you’re FREE