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Love and therapy

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 4/10/21

I’m old enough to get the why of it, but it’s genuinely funny to me that “flatscreen” is used as a shorthand for a certain kind of luxury electronics, often with the connotation that it’s an indulgence you shouldn’t be spending money on. It’s literally not possible to buy a new non-flatscreen anymore (I’m sure there people who prefer such vintage TVs for their “warmer analog picture” or whatever), and you can now get flatscreens for cheaper, indexed for inflation, than CRTs ever were! Anyway, there’s a lot going on here, including (a) a therapist who looks like a 1970s (?) stereotype of a Freudian analyst, (b) Grimm is stealing things from Mother Goose, who he lives with?, (c) someone (Mother Goose?) is paying to send Grimm to therapy, and (d) they have pills for kleptomania now????, but for whatever reason it’s the flatscreen thing that jumps out at me.

Dustin, 4/10/21

Sorry, as an [extremely heavy sigh] daily Dustin reader, I reject the central premise of today’s strip. Dustin’s mom absolutely does not care if Dustin’s dad lives or dies. Nobody does!

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Feel like my toes are the color they should be and I’d like to keep them that way, thanks

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Dustin, 3/28/21

I was going to start this post with “Did … did the manufacturer of warfarin write this comic” and then do a whole riff about how this seven year old kid may not need a blood thinner but the geriatrics who represent the biggest cohort among newspaper comics reader just might, but then I checked out warfarin’s Wikipedia article and found out it’s a generic drug, so that doesn’t really work. It’s just funnier if you get to use the actual name of a pharmaceutical conglomerate, you know? Anyway, I also learned that the warfarin was originally developed as a rat poison, its most common side effect is “bleeding,” and it can also cause something called “purple toes syndrome,” so, honestly, it really does need some good press.

Blondie, 3/28/21

The premise of the main gag of this comic is pointless — why would Mr. Dithers need a drone to keep tabs on Dagwood when there’s literally an entire sector of the software industry dedicated to producing spyware that bosses can use to keep tabs on their workers? — but I have to admit I found the throwaway panels, in which Dagwood reacts to a video poker website with more excitement and engagement than he’s ever demonstrated towards his career or his family, haunting enough that today’s strip will stick with me for weeks.

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Let your hate FLOW

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Dustin, 3/27/21

For a brief moment, I thought today’s Dustin was an example of that lowest form of comic strip humor: a character in a strip being tasked with making a dumb joke more appealing by reacting to it as if it’s funny, which is it isn’t. But then I remembered that Dustin’s dad is a lawyer! Turns out Dustin’s dad isn’t just an asshole; he also hates his son as much as his son hates his children, which is honestly a best case scenario for the next few weeks of this strip as far as I’m concerned. Let’s get beyond passive aggression into pure chaos!

Funky Winkerbean, 3/27/21

You know what would make this strip a lot funnier? If you could see Harry’s face in panel two, and there were, like, tons of blood flowing out of his mouth and down his chin as he cheerfully declared “I got the gig!” And then panel three was cut out entirely. Well, I’m not sure if “funnier” is quite the right word, but I think we can all agree it’d be better.