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Dustin, 4/17/25

Really loving Dustin’s facial expression in the second panel here. “Ah,” he’s thinking, “he doesn’t love her either. He may hate her as much as he hates me. It’s not great, but it’s kind of satisfying to know, honestly.”

Mary Worth, 4/17/25

Dawn’s face in panel two here is almost as good. That’s the face of a college student who is absolutely going to choke down the soggy, room-temperature sandwich she’s been carrying around in her backpack all day, just to spite the woman who was loudly fucking her dad most of the previous evening. The fact that she’ll save herself from being poisoned is just a bonus, assuming she wouldn’t prefer a quick death to enduring the rest of Belle’s visit.

Marvin, 4/17/25

This isn’t really about facial expressions, just about how Bitsy the dog is infested with parasites and that makes him an outcast from dog society. His facial expression in panel two, as he contemplates the fact that everyone is disgusted by him, is kind of poignant, I guess.

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Hi and Lois, 4/7/25

Ah hell yeah, Hi and Lois is at it again, with “it” being a mostly punchline-free strip about the formless but omnipresent disquiet in the Flagston household. Hi isn’t sure what haunts him but he’s definitely haunted. Even while he sleeps! It never lets up!

Dustin, 4/7/25

Dustin’s dad is over at the opposite, more depressive end of the axis from Hi, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, frankly. Sure, he wants for nothing, but he’s got a dark hole at the heart of him that he can’t ever fill. That doesn’t mean he won’t try! If donuts can’t do it, maybe yelling at Dustin can!

Suburban Fairy Tales, 4/7/25

I don’t talk about this one much but I thought you’d be interested in knowing that the second little pig just got hit by a car and died. He fucking died. RIP second little pig, [comic doesn’t have Wikipedia article — try to figure out when it started publishing]-2025, you taught me that it was OK to be weird a bad idea to build a house out of straw.

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The Phantom, 4/6/25

One thing I respect about the Phantom is that, for a strip that started out with a fairly dubious colonialist attitude, it now makes a good faith effort to imagine what life would be like realistically in Bangalla, a post-colonial African state that balances a modern capital inhabited by a Westernized elite with a large citizen body that still lives more traditional lifestyles. That’s why I’m intrigued by this new storyline, in which a group of Wambesi living in Mawitaan return home to [squints at last panel] [record scratch] THE UNGRAVED? Best case scenario, it’s some nightmare where corpses are strewn about the village; worst case scenario will be a zombie situation that will have me taking back all the stuff I just said about how far this strip has come.

Dustin and Beetle Bailey, 4/6/25

Ah, it’s time for some fun dream sequences starring two of the funnies’ most callow young people! The Dustin one is straightforward enough to parse — Dustin, who lives with the father who hates him, finds himself trapped on a tiny island with him, a horizon that he can never reach visible in every direction as his father keeps demanding he get a job just in time for another general economic collapse. Beetle Bailey is a bit sillier — ha ha, he’s sick of peeling potatoes, so he’s dreaming of Cookie as a giant angry potato! — but I have to admit that the potato-man seems more and more unsettling the more I look it. The way his body is all head, the way his arms apparently connect to his back, the way he waves around a knife that will be used to slice off the skin of his fellow potatoes and, ultimately, himself? … well, it’s an unsettling look into Beetle’s subconscious, I’ll just say that.