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Dustin, 5/6/22

Dustin is a truly amazing strip, one whose whole purpose is to poke fun of the foibles of young people despite clearly having no real sense of how young people live their lives, and one of the ways this manifests, as I have frequently griped, is that the young people characters go to fern bars in order to seek out romantic entanglements, like it’s the god-damned Reagan Administration or something. I guess some garbled communication has filtered back to Dustin HQ that modern hookup culture is entirely focused on dating apps now, which could explain why this young lady is at a fern bar but also on her laptop for some reason.

Hi and Lois, 5/6/22

I was going to make fun of Hi for seeming so shocked that Chip and his date might go dutch, but then I realized he has that same slack-jawed befuddled look in panel one as the conversation begins, too. Honestly, he looks like that a lot of the time! That Hi Flagston, just a befuddled dipshit stumbling his way through life on the funny pages!

Pluggers, 5/6/22

Ha ha, I absolutely love the look on that dog-man’s face. It’s gonna be real horror show in that house and this guy knows it.

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Dustin, 5/4/22

I’m going give the “joke” in today’s Dustin the zero attention it deserves and instead will focus on a background detail that is driving me crazy. Whenever I do something like this, I get a million comments that gaslight me like, “Josh, it’s actually 100% normal for someone to make and eat an ice cream cone at home, you’re the weird one” but: do you freaks really have ice cream cones at home???? I mean, a big thing of ice cream in the freezer, sure, that’s normal, but decent people eat it out of a bowl, or out of the carton over the sink. Having a box (?) of ice cream cones in the pantry (??), ready to fill with ice cream at any moment, seems decadent and perverse to me, but I’m just a simple, honest American who maybe doesn’t understand this modern world anymore, just like Dustin’s atlas-loving dad.

Mary Worth, 5/4/22

Wow, what’s the most boring way we could get caught up on the background of Ian and Helen’s sordid past? Is it Toby calmly telling Mary about it while eliding the juicy details? Because that’s what we’re getting. This blows. Damn it, she’s probably not even going to angrily crush that muffin into crumbs as she tries and fails to stop herself from visualizing Helen in Ian’s arms!

Mutts, 5/4/22

NOBODY EVER CLAIMED SHE WAS

THE SONG IS “SHEENA IS A PUNK ROCKER,” LIKE ONE OF SEVERAL

WHAT ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT, YOU CLOYING LITTLE DOG

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Mary Worth, 4/19/22

Oh ho ho, our man Ian has finally found out what’s troubling his young-ish bride and isn’t going to fly into one of his trademark rages at all! No, he’s had enough red wine to be positively mellow about this whole Cal situation, though it’s not entirely clear what kind of mellow he is: the kind where he’s ruefully amused by the hilarious predicament his dim wife has gotten herself into, or the kind where he’s hoping that his wife and her new boyfriend will be open to letting him discreetly watch.

Dick Tracy, 4/19/22

The current Dick Tracy storyline involves a guy named “Matt” who is pretending to be a dead Dick Tracy villain named Tonsils, and also dating the real Tonsils’s former girlfriend, who knows he’s not the real Tonsils but is still into it? It’s not as sick as a guy getting eaten by rats, but, real talk: it’s not not sick, either. Anyway, Dick is trying to tell Matt about how Tonsils came to a bad end and he needs to stay on the straight and narrow, but I’m sorry, are you painting a word-picture of a guy waving a bottle of GASO[LINE?] around while terrified people shove money at him and you expect us to not think he’s awesome? Please.

Dustin, 4/19/22

This joke depends on the structure of the comics delivering us instantly from panel two to panel three and it works more or less fine on that level, but I’m still trying to visualize how this would play out in real life. I don’t care how fast you work, it’d take at least 30 seconds to wolf down each of these two full-sized donuts, and I’d like to imagine Dustin’s dad’s discomfited coworker staring at him silently the whole time, waiting for him to blurt out this punchline along with a shower of crumbs.