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Beetle Bailey, 9/5/24

Sarge is correct: his men are extremely vulnerable to the range weapons that are fated to kill them when they finally enter combat.

Dennis the Menace, 9/5/24

Menace level: violating the intellectual property of Rich Hall.

Hi and Lois, 9/5/24

Oh, man, sorry these two peaceful animals are just doing their thing and not interacting, Trixie! Sorry they’re not insulting each other through comical speech impediments. Sorry they’re not trying to murder each other, for your amusement!

Mary Worth, 9/5/24

“Or are you fucking? Are you fucking my fiance? Hahaha I’m cool with it if you are, but I just want to know. Are you fucking my fiance? YES OR NO, YOU HAVE TO TELL ME”

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Gil Thorp, 9/2/24

Happy Labor Day, everybody! I guess it’s now an annual tradition for a continuity strip character to appear as Rosie the Riveter to promote the American labor movement. I’m going to take this opportunity to be a bit of a killjoy and point out that the now-iconic “We Can Do It!” poster was actually a piece of internal propoganda produced by Westinghouse Electric in 1942 in an attempt to get its employees to work harder; another poster from the same series provides pretty good evidence of where on the labor/capital divide the ultimate sympathies of the campaign lay. “We Can Do It!” was not associated with the “Rosie the Riveter” concept at the time, was not widely seen outside Westinghouse during the war, and was largely forgotten until the Washington Post Magazine did an article about patriotic wartime art in 1982. Much more famous at the time — and perhaps more in tune with the labor movement — was Norman Rockwell’s 1943 Rosie the Riveter cover for the Saturday Evening Post, which features Rosie chowing down on a sandwich on her lunch break while grinding a copy of Mein Kampf under her foot. Perhaps we can get Abbey Spencer or Sarah Morgan to do this pose next year.

Alice, 9/2/24

Most cartoonists are of course more interested in making jokes about “Ha ha, we call it Labor Day but nobody’s working” than they are exploring and celebrating advances in workers’ rights, of course, which is kind of funny considering most cartoonists are freelancers who don’t get paid holidays of any sort. Hey, Alice, maybe instead of lying around all day you should organize your workforce!

Hi and Lois, 9/2/24

I know the whole dynamic of the Thurstons’ marriage is that Irma is perpetually enraged about her husband’s laziness, but he very much does have a job that he goes to every weekday with Hi. Like, that’s an important part of the strip lore. He’s also not unionized, as he’s management (I’m basing this on the fact that he wears a tie to the office, but I think given the lingering 1950s aesthetic that’s a pretty good rubric), so maybe this is just further topical commentary.

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Dick Tracy, 8/26/24

Someone who’s had some weird romance arcs in his time is Junior, Dick Tracy’s son in the comic strip Dick Tracy. Long ago he was married to Moon Maid, daughter of the Governor of the Moon, and he had a half-Lunarian daughter with her, but then she got blown up by a car bomb meant for him. Later he married Sparkle Plenty, daughter of comical rustics B.O. and Gertie Plenty; that relationship was briefly thrown into turmoil when Moon Maid seemed to reappear, but then it turned out some gangster had modified his hapless girlfriend with Lunarian DNA, and the poor woman eventually changed her name to “Mysta Chimera” and accommodated herself to her new life as a hideous genetic abomination and platonic pal to Junior and his family. However … is there a new contender for his love? How else do you explain that he’s chosen a tastefully glamorous photo of Rikki Mortis, the goth lover of notorious corpse-criminal Abner Kadaver, as his desktop wallpaper? More on this Tracy family romantic drama as it (probably fails to) develop!

Hi and Lois, 8/26/24

One thing I love about legacy comics is how they freeze certain stereotyped images and settings in amber, even when the journeyman artists and writers tasked with churning out the comics are young enough that they themselves only remember them from older comics. One example is the idea, omnipresent in the comics, that upscale fine dining restaurants feature plush decor and white tablecloths; in fact, that hasn’t been true for newer restaurants since the ’90s, and even the old timers have mostly transitioned to the new aesthetics, which are all about high ceilings and hard, industrial-style surfaces. A 2018 Atlantic article that I think about all the time chronicles this transition and points out that the result is a much louder dining experience, which restaurants like because it’s less conducive to sitting around pleasantly chatting and thus increases customer turnover and restaurant profits. Anyway, I was reminded of this today because another aspect of modern restaurant design is that it features large, open, continuous spaces instead of the warren of rooms you might have found in a traditional eatery, so there’s no longer any place to stash the Flagston family where the other, more desirable patrons can’t see or hear them.

Mary Worth, 8/26/24

I dunno, Ed, this seems like a great way to show up at your wedding and discover that the theme is “WHY WON’T MY NEW HUSBAND PAY ATTENTION TO ME????”