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Marvin and Hi and Lois, 8/24/24

Jeff … Hi … you morons. You idiots. You absolute fools. You’re already looking ahead to the passage of time, to the day when your kids have grown up and this phase of their life and yours is over forever, either with an anticipatory sense of nostalgia (Hi) or a frankly dickish mercenary sullenness (Jeff). But it will never happen. You’re stuck there, with these kids at the age they are, forever. It’s already been decades, but you can’t see it, can’t feel it, can’t know it. But it has been, and it will be. This is it. This is now. This is always now.

Mary Worth, 8/24/24

I guess Ed is cradling his new finacée firmly but gently in his arms to reestablish intimacy after their little dispute, but it really just looks like he’s physically restraining her from rushing to the table and adding yet another color-coded folder to her collection, this one for information on local DJs sorted by price and Yelp rating.

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Dennis the Menace, 6/8/24

“Dennis shit-talks his mother’s cooking” isn’t my favorite trope in this strip, but I feel you at least have to respect the form: he should either be poking sullenly at his food, glowering at everyone, absolutely ruining the energy of the family meal, or he should be making some witty quip that emotionally devastates Alice while Henry barely conceals a smirk. But while the dialogue here works, the art is all off: Dennis looks extremely pleased by the high-nutrition meal that’s been prepared for him, and his parents are all smiles. This frankly is so un-menacing that it loops all the way around to menacing again because it’s so deeply uncanny.

Judge Parker, 6/8/24

OK, since I’m embracing being a cranky old man who hates change, I’m just going to say it: “eloping” is supposed to mean that you sneak off and get married without telling any of your friends and family, often without even being formally engaged first. But more and more people are just using it to mean “We’re going have a small wedding, actually, even though we told some people we were planning to have a big one at some point in the future,” and I hate it! The secrecy is the point! You don’t just wander in and announce it while your fiancee is in the middle of a Zoom call with her mother!

Blondie, 6/8/24

YES IT CERTAINLY IS ANNOYING WHEN A CHILD SHOWS UP AT YOUR HOUSE AND EVEN THOUGH YOU’RE DOING OTHER STUFF YOU’RE EXPECTED TO PAY ATTENTION TO THEM

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/29/23

Believe me, if there’s one bit of empathy doing this blog for multiple decades has granted me, it’s the understanding that it’s actually really a grind to come up with a new joke every day indefinitely, so I don’t blame comics writers for latching onto whatever they can as a a prompt. Blondie in particular loves to use fake holidays made up for marketing purposes to hang their jokes on, and that’s what I assumed was going on here, but a little Googling shows that “Contrarian Day” simply is not a thing — it mostly seems to occur in the phrase “contrarian day trader,” which is a sort of person who, if some very sad Reddit threads are any indication, frequently loses a lot of money. Anyway, you’d think he could’ve just said “Opposite Day?” That isn’t any kind of official holiday either, but at least it’s been sanctified by numerous cruel teens, right after they tell you that your clothes look nice.

Dennis the Menace, 9/29/23

What’s the menace here? That Dennis is revealing to his mother that his father has a comely assistant? That Dennis is accusing his father of being bad at his job and needing help? Neither: it’s that his father has violated their community’s WASP code and hired [shudder] an Italian.