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Daddy Daze, 9/27/22

The lure of doing a comic strip about a baby is eternal, but of course each generation will do their own particular version reflecting their ethos, worldview, and material conditions; and the fact that a syndicated comic strip is essentially a lifelong sinecure lets us contrast the varying generational attitudes directly against one another. Take Marvin, for instance: launched in 1982, as the Baby Boom generation was coming into its own and America was shaking off its post-Vietnam malaise, its title character represents the bold and unapologetic national attitude of the era: yes, Marvin shits and pisses himself constantly, and no he won’t apologize for it or learn how to stop. It’s someone else’s problem and the thought of them dealing with it makes him smile!

The Daddy Daze baby, on the other hand, is a creature of our current neurotic age. Like Marvin, he is unable to prevent himself from befouling his diaper several times a day, but his usual gleeful mania is actually just a pose, masking a deep, gnawing anxiety about all the pooping and the peeing. He knows he’s disgusting and he desperately wants to learn to use a toilet, but also knows that, as a baby in a syndicated comic strip, he’s never going to reach that promised land and well just be stewing in his own waste for all eternity.

Gasoline Alley, 9/27/22

Say what you will about Gasoline Alley, and lord knows I’ve said a lot, but it remains a piece of true outsider art that’s somehow pumped into the reading lists of surviving loyal newspaper readers across the English-speaking world. Can you imagine tricking major publishers into printing the sentence “Blimey, my red sock has entangled itself betwixt the keys and rendered me immobile for the moment” in thousands of newspapers as some sort of avant-garde action, or maybe as a prank? Of course not, and yet everyone involved in the process that produced this strip thinks it’s normal, wholesome fun. No, I am absolutely not going to explain what’s happening here, by the way, you don’t need to know and don’t particularly want to, trust me.

Gil Thorp, 9/27/22

No! No! We cannot lose Coach Kaz! I don’t care if the Time Corps has recruited him as an agent in our nation’s shadowy war against those who would alter the space-time continuum — we need his antics in Milford!

Funky Winkerbean, 9/27/22

My immediate reaction to the first panel of this strip is that Jessica wanted Darrin to somehow make the gun that Plantman used to murder her father into a plaything for their son. But then, based on everyone’s facial expressions, by the end of the strip I decided she actually wanted it made into some sort of sex toy. I’m not well, but in my defense, neither is Funky Winkerbean.

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Blondie, 8/3/22

I feel like it goes without saying that today’s Blondie is some real sicko shit. Obviously it’s very gross that Blondie made this nightmare in the first place, or that Dagwood said “I look delicious!” or that he says he hopes he looks “half as good to you in real life” as this breakfast abomination, which looks real weird and fucked up, actually, but to me the worst part is that he’s eating it upside down. Like I know it’s turned that way so we, the readers, can get a good look at it, but if you gave someone a pancake decorated to look like a human face and they started eating it from the forehead side, I would absolutely believe they were a serial killer with no further information needed.

Gasoline Alley, 8/3/22

Good news, everybody! That spaceship they built in Gasoline Alley out of garbage actually worked! Why is that “good news,” you’re probably wondering? Well, assuming that the geopolitical situation in the Alleyverse is more or less similar to ours, the boys manning the radar machines over at the Strategic Missile Forces of the Russian Federation are probably pretty on edge when it comes to unexpected rocket launches coming from the continental United States, so with any luck the sprawling Gasoline Alley cast of characters is about to be wiped out in its entirety by a series of nuclear explosions.

Shoe, 8/3/22

This is only tangentially related to the strip here but my usual epithets for the anthropomorphic creatures in Shoe and Pluggers are phrases like “bird-person” or “beast-man” and it occurs to me that “people person” is technically what the opposite of that would be.

Mary Worth, 8/3/22

“Like, if you treat them real shitty, for instance! It turns out that other people can feel emotional and physical pain, just like we can? Real fucked up, isn’t it.”

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Gasoline Alley, 7/23/22

Despite feeling obliged to read Gasoline Alley every day, I often fail to retain the details of its sprawling cast and their various problems, because honestly, why do that with my precious brain space when I could be doing literally anything else with it, but it’s slowly been dawning on me that the “Jimmy” who we recently saw ruining his sister’s sex life is the same kid who got a ride on a real live steam locomotive because he was dying of some unspecified terminal illness all the way back in 2014. I’m not sure if they somehow cured him in the interim and I just forgot or if the kid suffers from “Walt Syndrome,” a rare condition unique to the Alleyverse where a character lingers at the ege of death indefinitely without ever actually dying, but clearly Jimmy’s sister’s paramour is done with waiting. That’s why he’s turning to his grandfather Slim, who once got mad about some local teens playing basketball so he hired a guy to murder them by dropping a meteorite on them out of a helicopter. Slim knows from killing minors in elaborate space-themed “accidents,” in other words, and this rocketship built much faster than NASA ever could, with fewer safety features than NASA would ever be allowed to include, will do nicely.

Dick Tracy, 7/23/22

So whey would some faction of the now Earthbound race of Moon People want to turn their monstrous powers against Earth’s unsuspecting governments? Well, it turns out their Moon youth are being corrupted by anime. How else do you expect any self-respecting civilization to respond?

Hi and Lois, 7/23/22

Honestly respect how absolutely devastated Hi is by this. He’s been hanging on by a thread for a while now, but at least he thought that his family respected his grilling prowess. Now even that’s been taken from him, and there’s nothing left.