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Pardon My Planet, 4/17/19

Welp, I’ve got three more months of analysis under my belt and I still do not know what the deal is with Pardon My Planet. Are these two a stable couple of characters we’re supposed to know and love? Or does everyone in the strip just kind of look like this? Definitely could not tell you! I do enjoy the image of a Gen-X dude with a soul patch coming home after a long day at the office, settling back in his favorite chair, and then his beloved wife, dressed in a traditional tube top, brings him a soothing martini and engages him in discourse about the etymology of common phrases. I don’t necessarily want to live in this world, but I’m definitely warmed by the idea that it might exist.

Hi and Lois, 4/17/19

Man, it sure seems like Trixie’s been abandoned even more than usual today, doesn’t it? “I’ll just let the weather guy on Channel 7 babysit her until Chip gets home from school,” says Lois, as she hastily packs a bag and prepares to leave forever. “He seems trustworthy.”

Mary Worth, 4/17/19

ARTHUR IS COMING, EVERYBODY

BRACE YOURSELVES

BRACE YOURSELVES FOR THE MOST DELICIOUS DISAPPOINTMENT YOU’VE EVER SEEN

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Beetle Bailey, 3/29/19

Sorry, I feel like I have to call bullshit here: while Beetle Bailey is somewhat of a trickster narrative figure, like Kokopelli or Bugs Bunny, his overwhelmingly dominant characteristic is that he is extremely lazy. He can’t even maintain consciousness for the full duration of a single date, so I refuse to believe that he has the gumption or energy to either learn enough artistic skill to paint a serviceable Picasso pastiche, or that he would bother to dress up like an “artist” stereotype just to add to the laughs when General Halftrack confronted him.

Hi and Lois, 3/29/19

Chip, I know you live out in the ‘burbs and have only passing familiarity with what the hipsters are up to, so, as someone who lives in the belly of the urban beast, let me assure you that hipsters today are all about growing elaborately sculpted and maintained facial hair and getting $60 haircuts and beard trims at “retro” barbershops with extremely on-the-nose names, to give you just one example within electric-scooter-riding radius from my house. Ditto, who seems more plugged in to the zeitgeist, is right to “Huh?” at you in slack-jawed shock as he imagines you walking into some dive bar simulacrum and ordering a $17 cocktail only to have the handlebar-mustachio’d bartender laugh in your Don Johnson-esque face.

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Hi and Lois, 3/3/19

Wow, I’ve never noticed that the Flagston house looks … really small from the outside? Like, I know that the design dates back to when the strip launched the ’50s, when new suburban houses were much smaller than they are now. (In a similar phenomenon, the Bumstead home layout dates from the ’20s and doesn’t even have a shower.) But in this comic, the Flagston house looks shockingly tiny, like it doesn’t even seem to have a wing for bedrooms. Certainly it’s not big enough to get amorous by the fire when you’ve got four kids around! Which may explain why the kids are not around, having possibly been left outside to freeze to death.

Spider-Man, 3/3/19

Killgrave is a man with the nearly unstoppable ability to utterly enslave someone with his voice — and having just exposed himself to a special nerve gas, he’s now able to command multiple people at once. Spider-Man and Luke Cage, two powerful superheroes, were only barely able to defeat him. And now they’re going to hand him over to … the police? Sure! That’s going to go great! “Should we have told them to make sure to not take the blanket off of him?” “Ennnh, they’ll figure it out.”