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Dustin, 9/21/22

A thing about doing a comic strip every day for years and years is that keeping up with whatever “high concept” you used to sell the thing in the first place gets exhausting, so eventually you just start having characters say whatever jokes you or your gag writers can come up with or have maybe heard from someone else, ignoring more and more frequently the fact that they’re birds or whatever. Dustin’s been around for more than a decade now, so hopefully we’re getting closer and closer to the blessed moment where it stops being a Millennial vs. Boomer battle and just features its various generic characters driving around and reciting forwarded email jokes to one another.

Gasoline Alley, 9/21/22

Wow, it’s really sad that sexually aggressive frog-demons go unpunished in this strip, while we’re treated to images of innocent trees screaming in agony as they burn to death!

Gil Thorp, 9/21/22

Oh snap! Heather Burns is in her first week on the job as Marjie Ducey’s replacement and she’s already shaking up the staid Milford Star’s ways by live-tweeting the game! This would be a real threat to Marty Moon’s radio show if he still had a radio show, but I’m pretty sure he’s just up there in a peach crate, yelling into a headset that isn’t connected to anything.

Hi and Lois, 9/21/22

Wait, who the hell was Thirsty texting? His only friend is Hi and he hates his wife, so I don’t … ohhhh, he was in the bathroom with his phone “texting,” got it.

Mary Worth, 9/21/21

No, Wilbur! This woman works with dogs all day, so you can’t use dogs to flirt with her! Plus you don’t even have a dog yet! You’re swinging into action too soon! Bad Wilbur! Bad! [whacks Wilbur’s nose with a rolled-up newspaper]

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Slylock Fox, 8/25/21

Based on the animal quiz that accompanies this drawing, that’s clearly supposed to be a wolf out there howling at the moon, and I’m very intrigued that the anonymous syndicate colorist chose to give him Slylock’s bright red fur. Clearly the reality is that they saw “canid in Slylock Fox” and used the fill tool with web-safe bright red without really thinking about it, but I’d like to believe that they briefly contemplated the idea of this strip’s normally cerebral title character stripping off his clothes and howling at the moon, and they said “Honestly? Good for him.”

Dustin, 8/25/21

Sorry, I refuse to believe Dustin’s dad likes impressionism at all. He is absolutely one of those people who would look at any art that isn’t photorealist portraiture and sneer “My kid could’ve done this.” (Then he’d look at Dustin and say, “Well, somebody’s kid could’ve done this, I guess.”)

Gil Thorp, 8/25/21

Oh, wow! Marjie Ducey, the Thorp-friendliest media figure in Milford, is going to retire, and now the paper’s going to hire a woman who was literally Gil’s student like two years ago to replace her! I certainly hope Marty Moon has something to say about this blatant conflict of interest, though we haven’t heard from him in quite a while, and frankly he may still be having some kind of hallucinatory experience in the wooden crate that serves as the Milford press box.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/25/21

We all, of course, have our own personal “what’s the worst recurring theme in Funky Winkerbean?” take, but I think we can all agree that “sometimes the strip hints that there may be multiple rivals for Les’s sexual attention” is in the top five.

Family Circus, 8/25/21

Look, Billy’s all hyped up because he’s been huffing pine cones! And honestly? Good for him.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/26/21

Remember Bizzy Buzz Buzz, the Snuffy Smith character who was named after a popular (?) 1960s toy and whose whole deal is that she likes to obsessively clean things? Well, she’s back. This lovable unaccompanied minor who just can’t get enough of doing unpaid labor for her kinfolk is back! She will be returning every 3-5 years to this strip whether you like it or not, so you might as well grit your teeth and fall in love with her, it’ll be easier that way.

Funky Winkerbean, 7/26/21

Ah, well, it seems like Phil’s death-faking may have been a bit less involved than I had anticipated, and really the only people possibly facing any legal consequences would be the lawyers who straight-up lied to Darrin about why they were sending those covers to him, but what’s a little light lying for a client, who it’s been established was sort of cheated out of a lot revenue for his comics creations and probably couldn’t pay you very much in the first place? Anyway, it turns out Phil mostly faked his death because he didn’t like attention, but then after a few years he realized that in fact maybe he was wrong about that, so he revealed that he was alive in an extremely dramatic fashion at a packed comics convention, so everyone could pay attention to him and his insane life choices.

Dustin, 7/26/21

We all love the comic strip Dustin, because it’s brought balance to the Generation Wars by proving that everyone, whether they’re a Silent or a Boomer or a Gen Xer or a Millennial or a Zoomer, is basically unlikeable. But have you been waiting for the strip to take on a bold new frontier by getting unpleasantly horny? Well, good news!

Pluggers, 7/26/21

Say, did you know there’s a French phrase for this very phenomenon? It’s l’esprit de l’escalier, which literally means “the spirit of the staircase,” the idea being that you think of the perfect bon mot as you’re walking up the stairs to your apartment after you’ve left the party. In related news, I thought of the phrase that’s mostly likely to trigger a plugger into a violent rage, and it’s “Say, did you know there’s a French phrase for this very phenomenon?”