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Beetle Bailey, 8/29/24

I was going to say that Beetle’s whining here is unrealistic, as well as being literally, legally insubordinate, but you know what? The damn strip is named Beetle Bailey! If not for him, Halftrack wouldn’t even exist! Put some damn respect on his name, General!

Blondie, 8/29/24

Sorry, man, you don’t put a giant calendar like that on your fridge if you’re counting down towards something you’re wistful about, like the end of barbecuing season. I think it’s clear that Dagwood’s in a doomsday cult, the “last summer barbecue” is going to burn up most of the neighborhood and the people who live there, and he’s pissed because he’s been informed he won’t be able to partake of the Flesh of the Righteous alongside the Leader before he too is immolated.

Gearhead Gertie, 8/29/24

I gotta say, if you’re sitting on a park bench minding your own business and a total stranger decides to start tut-tutting at you about the kids today and their phones, I think indignantly replying “I’m reading about NASCAR” is as good a comeback as any. Maybe it’ll convince them that you’re decent, salt-of-the-earth people, or maybe it’ll just confuse them, but either way chances are good they’ll leave you alone!

Mary Worth, 8/29/24

ME WHEN I ASSSUMED DR. ED WAS TAKING ESTELLE TO A VETERINARIAN CONVENTION BECAUSE HE WAS AFRAID SHE WAS GETTING TOO OBSESSIVE ABOUT WEDDING STUFF AND ALSO SO SHE COULD LEARN MORE ABOUT THE PROFESSION: Well, I’m not sure this is really what she’d want but I think his heart’s in the right place.

ME TODAY AS I LEARN DR. ED IS TAKING ESTELLE TO A VETERINARIAN CONVENTION BECAUSE HE “OWES” HER A “DAY OUT” AND WAS GOING THERE ANYWAY: Girl. Dump him. Dump him girl!!!!

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PROGRAMMING NOTE: haha whoops I screwed up the days for several posts this week, here’s Wednesday’s if you haven’t seen that yet

Dennis the Menace, 8/8/24

Look, I respect the effort here — the fundmental underlying joke is pretty good, Alice’s indignant facial expression is funny, and Dennis looking genuinely hurt in the background is a nice touch. “Lived to tell about it.com” isn’t a great URL, though, because it honestly sounds like a site for something a lot more traumatic and kind of spoils the mood, and a much bigger problem is that it’s a website at all. A group of modern young baby sitters is simply not going to go to the trouble to buy a domain name and then set up a WordPress account for a group blog or whatever. They’d set up a community on social media somewhere — Facebook, maybe, Facebook groups have had a little bit of a comeback with younger people, or maybe whatever the TikTok equivalent is. Or a private Discord server! There probably isn’t a TikTok equivalent, now that I think about it, not that I would know, because I don’t go on there. What happens on TikTok is none of my business. The important thing is that I know that I don’t know, which Socrates would say makes me smart. I’m going to run with that. Anyway, nice try but botched execution, Dennis the Menace, I give this 6 out of 10 stars.

Gearhead Gertie, 8/8/24

I’ve decided that my favorite kind of Gearhead Gertie panels are the ones where she’s antagonizing her husband. This one is great because you could imagine that the joke is that this is the thinnest of pretenses over her attempts to establish a throuple, but it’s actually much more wholesome (or, depending on how you see it, more perverse): it’s all exactly as it seems, she just loves NASCAR that much, and it makes her husband crazy. The cable guy, despite his unconventional new living situation, doesn’t seem to notice this drama, or care about it if he does. He’s just happy to be there!

Pluggers, 8/8/24

These two pluggers aren’t just romantically smiling at each other after dinner. Obviously they are doing that — those tight faces and bugged out eyes simply scream “romance” — but there’s aslo something more to it. Thanks for cluing us in, Pluggers!

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Gearhead Gertie, 7/18/24

Frank Sinatra died in a hospital with his wife by his side, which, when it comes to ways to die, is not the worst by any means. But consider: what if instead he had died onstage because he sang a song that was far too dangerous and lost control of it, while thousands of his fans looked on, horrified but deep down inside thrilled, because isn’t the possibility of death, no matter how slim, just the far edge of the same space of drama that brought them there in the first place? Obviously that’s not what pulls in concertgoers, that’s not really what live music is about, but also that’s why Gertie is still robust and full of energy, feeding on the visceral noise and violence and risk of NASCAR, and her husband is a pencil neck listening to his little records, a man whose requests to fly a giant Sinatra flag out front once in a while have been repeatedly nixed.

Family Circus, 7/18/24

Look, you can try to prevent your children from learning anything about sex and reproduction all you want, but eventually, in the absence of information, they will try figuring out how it all works on their own from whatever they can glean from their environment, and the results will honestly be much more disturbing than you can imagine.