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Dustin, 9/26/20

You know, for a brief, shining moment, I assumed the joke here was that “tuna” just means “fish” in its language of origin, and I thought to myself that “Hey, the few seconds I spent thinking about Dustin today won’t be wasted, for once, because I’ve learned something,” but nope, it turns out the word tuna ultimately derives from the Greek thynnos, which means, well, tuna. So “tuna fish” may be repetitive in that you’re naming a thing and then the larger category of thing that the thing belongs to, but it’s repetitive in an entirely different way than when you name a team after a city, but do so by translating the city’s name into English. And let’s not even get into how the team was for decades called the California Angels, which was actually a fairly clever way to nod to L.A. while claiming territory all over the state after they moved to Orange County, and only recently changed to Los Angeles Angels and it was a whole big controversy! Anyway, the big news is that I got so mad about this that I wasted a lot more than a few seconds thinking about Dustin today.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/26/20

Man, who could forget the Glenwood Motel, the depressing place where Truck was forced to quarantine in isolation for days because he was suffering from a persistent respiratory illness? Normally you’d say this experience was a terrible theme for a song, but occasionally, an artist stumbles into his perfect historical moment.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/20/20

Hey, remember Nancy, Kelly’s sneering mean-girl nemesis who tried to key Kelly’s car, back when Kelly was being chauffeured around in a hearse by mobsters because this strip used to be interesting? Well, Nancy briefly tried to do something interesting, but don’t worry: it was prevented from ever happening, off-panel, which is good because otherwise we might have had to watch it happen, instead of getting an entire Sunday strip of virtuous characters talking to each other on the phone.

Hi and Lois, 9/20/20

I genuinely love that (a) techno has been rendered as “boing bop bing” here and (b) that Hi has gone from dubious to extremely over it as Chip works his way through this bit.

Dustin, 9/20/20

You guys, Dustin finally did an actually kind of funny joke! Unfortunately the joke is that Popeye is on TV holding a can labelled “kale.” The punchline to the strip itself is not funny.

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Gil Thorp, 8/31/20

Man, remember when I had cautious but high hopes for a wacky Gil Thorp summer storyline? Well, it’s pretty much the end of summer, and I haven’t talked about Gil Thorp at all, but I can summarize what went down like this: star quarterback of yesteryear True Standish came back, having graduated and been inexplicably drafted by the Tampa Bay Rays, which is a baseball team, and the sassy and vaguely beloved Corina Karenna, who played catcher on Mike “The Mayor”’s ragtag baseball team from the bad kid school, was recruited to help True work out his arm. If that sounds like it might’ve been vaguely wacky, keep in mind that most of the eight weeks was spent talking about True and Corina’s mothers, who have both battled depression, which was very serious and not wacky at all. But now Corina is attending Milford, it seems, which will … help her mom in some way I didn’t really follow, so I hope that the upcoming fall will feature less of her fiercely but tenderly caring for and defending her beloved family (SNOOZE) and more of her defying authority or at least sassing back at authority at a rate at least 10% higher than the usual Mudlark would.

Dustin, 8/31/20

The point of Dustin is, of course, to turn the battle between Dustin’s dad and Dustin into symbol of the Boomer-Millennial struggle. Of course, thanks to comic book time Dustin’s dad is now Gen X and Dustin is probably a Zoomer, but the point is that Dustin is lazy and can’t hold down a job or find a girlfriend so that’s evidence that young people in general suck. But here’s a young person who works at Dustin’s dad’s law firm and wears a suit and everything, but apparently he still sucks because, uh, phones? Anyway, since it’s clear that young people in general are fully capable of holding down a job, Dustin’s dad might want to consider that his kid sucks because he did a bad job raising him, just putting that out there.