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Blondie, 3/26/21

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but every once in a while a character pops up in Blondie who, even though they’re clearly drawn in the prevailing Blondie house style, gives off the vibe of being a caricature of a real person rather than a character made up out of whole cloth. I always assume this is done as a favor for a friend — or, in cases like today, when the dude in question is giving a knowing glance to the reader that says “eh? eh? I fell out of love with my fiance during the pandemic and no longer wish to marry her? eh?”, a personal attack on a nemesis.

Dick Tracy, 3/26/21

I’m continuing to refuse to try to understand the plot of the current Dick Tracy storyline and am just going along with its ~vibes~, and honestly having a pretty good time with it! I particularly like the final panel today, with a grim-faced Tiger Lilly shoving a crude drawing of a peace sign at a cop. “This is the commune’s cryptic symbol,” he’s saying. “Figure out what it means and you’ll be able to crack this thing wide open.”

Family Circus, 3/26/21

Billy looks pretty embarrassed, as well he should. If you’re putting on pants the normal way and can’t win a pants-putting-on-race against a kid who squirmed around until he somehow crammed both his feet through one pant leg while wearing shoes, you are not very good at putting on pants.

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Shoe, 3/21/21

You have to respect the absolute dedication that went into the production of today’s Shoe. For instance, someone at the syndicate presumably informed whoever thought up the joke that, no, society has not degraded so much that we can just print “cover your ass” in our talking bird funny-strip in mainstream newspapers. Did that deter them from soldiering on, even though the bowdlerized version of the phrase isn’t in common use at all? No, no it did not. Then, presumably, there came a point where the artist realized that, due to the long-established character design and the viewing angle chosen for the second panel of the strip, Shoe and the Perfesser’s tail feathers would be clearly visible. Now, you’re probably asking yourself: are the tail feathers themselves the analogue to the “ass” (or “rear”) of the common phrase, or do they themselves do the work of covering one’s ass/rear (which in this interpretation is the cloaca, I guess)? An interesting philosophical question, to be sure, but either answer renders the whole joke completely and obviously pointless. And yet, nevertheless, the Shoe creative team persisted. I for one think that’s beautiful, in its own way.

Family Circus, 3/21/21

One of the fundamental problems with long-running franchises and “cinematic universes” is that each new individual story adds a layer of canon that must be taken into account by future stories, and while I like to argue about Star Trek chronology and uniform design as much as the next nerd, I have come to sympathize with how this restricts the freedom of storytellers to produce an engaging narrative. That said, there are some lines that I feel strongly should not be crossed, no matter how entertaining the result. For instance, if there’s one thing we know from reading the Family Circus for decades, it’s that Jeffy does not understand the concept of object permanence.

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Dennis the Menace, 3/7/21

Look, I’m not going to say I’m a fan of Dennis the Menace, the character, exactly, but I also don’t think he should be muscled out of his own strip by Mr. Wilson, of all people, and relegated to a ghostly Barney Google-style existence. At least the Mr. Wilson-focused strip from a couple weeks ago featured our man George seething with rage about Dennis even though the lad himself was absent. In today’s strip, he’s just making a sandwich to irritate his wife, and I fear some line has been crossed.

Family Circus, 3/7/21

Not sure what I find more unnerving about this comic: the beginning of the sequence, where PJ floats as a pre-born soul on a heavenly cloud, or the end, where we learn that adults are shadowy figures forever imprisoned in some kind of internment camp called “Grownup-Land.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/7/21

God, I have waited for years for sinister, scheming Sarah to come back, and I am very much looking forward to our next plot, Sarah Faxes The Medical Board Some Financial Records They Might Be Very Interested In Seeing.