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Dick Tracy, 2/24/21

A little sniff before she fixes dinner, if you follow her. If you get her drift. Her snow drift. She’s talking about cocaine! I feel like what with all the weird escapades with “Pouch” and his stolen balloon “Blue” that this strip has been going on for the past several weeks, we’ve lost sight of the true star of this storyline: cocaine, and the recreational consumption and illegal distribution thereof.

Blondie, 2/24/21

Look, obviously the Blondie strips where she’s taking notes on the “[Insert Profession/Hobbyist Group To Make Jokes About Here] Group Luncheon” are just excuses to make some easy jokes riffing on widely accepted stereotypes about the profession or hobbyist group in question, and that’s a perfectly valid joke template for a long-running legacy strip like Blondie to have. I’m just saying, though, you really should have your stereotypes correct if you’re going down this road. Like, when I see someone with a sweater tied around their neck like this, I think “leader of the rich kid camp across the lake about to challenge our protagonists to a snobs vs. slobs battle in an ’80s comedy,” not “theater kid.”

Dustin, 2/24/21

I get that this is supposed to be a joke where an adult tells a child about how things used to be, but: Dustin is canonically supposed to be boomerang kid who came home from college and never left, and his younger sister is still in high school, so I don’t think we’re supposed to think of him as much past his mid 20s, meaning he was born in the mid-to-late ’90s; meanwhile, Facebook opened to the general public in 2006 and surpassed MySpace as the most heavily used social networking site in 2008, so “likes” have been a social currency for basically his entire life. On the other hand, Hayden, age seven, probably doesn’t use social media at all and when he starts it will be on some app whose feedback mechanisms are entirely strange and foreign to the rest of us. What I’m trying to say is, if you’re doing an entire strip about generation gaps, you at least need to know what various generations are into.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/24/21

“I think I basically get the urge to have a place where you sleep indoors and spend time when you’re not at work. But why would you want that place to be nice?”

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Dustin, 1/22/21

Ha ha, ladies, amiright folks? They definitely be shopping, and they also be using their purse for its intended purpose of carrying things around rather than just leaving it empty!

Gil Thorp, 1/22/21

Oh, right, in addition to the Vic and Doug storylines, this Gil Thorp basketball season also features a girl’s basketball storyline, about beloved (?) new Mudlark Corina Karenna, and how maybe she has some beef against Tessi Milton that she displays by sassing her in very mild ways like calling her by her last name, or maybe she’s just mildly sassy in general, who can say. Anyway, I’m definitely not saying that girls’ Gil Thorp storylines are less interesting than boys’ Gil Thorp storylines in a larger abstract sense, but I am going to say that Corina needs to get sassier by like two orders of magnitude if she wants to compete with Vic’s hot dog giveaways for my attention.

Mark Trail, 1/22/21

From the comic strip that brought you Boatsplosion! and Boatsplosion 2: The Boatsplosioning, comes: Boatsplosion III: Fireworks Yacht.

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Dustin, 1/12/21

You know, I’ve griped about Dustin slamming on millennials (as represented by the strip’s title character), but I haven’t put that much effort into it because, enh, millennials, probably they have it coming. But when you decide to come after librarians? When you say that librarians don’t want people eating and drinking in the library (which literally ruins books that cost money to replace that they’d have to pay out of their shrinking budget) and they don’t want people reshelving books (which patrons aren’t trained to do and if they screw it up it makes books difficult or impossible to find) and they don’t want people talking on their cell phones in the library (this is literally annoying to everybody, who could possibly object to idiots talking loudly on their cell phones in the library being asked to leave) because they’re frumpy martinets who love rules? That’s when I declare that you’re garbage person and I swear a sacred oath to destroy you. Be warned!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/12/21

So it looks like Barney Google and Snuffy Smith has decided on what the defining feature of its hot new character, Li’l Sparky, is going to be: it’s going to be puns based on noises horses make. As we can tell today, a key aspect of this bit is that Li’l Sparky is going to really insist that everyone acknowledge that he’s doing it, until all the other horses (and, I assume, eventually the non-horse characters) come to dislike him. Can’t wait!

Mary Worth, 1/12/21

“Greta, our friend Eve started weeping openly in public but doesn’t want to talk about it. Is there some way I can make this about me?”