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Archive: Hi and Lois

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Mostly Walker-Browne Sunday

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Hi and Lois, 5/5/24

I guess the point of this strip (to the extent that any given Hi and Lois comic can be said to have a “point”) is to shore up the Walker-Browne brand and remind American that the Camp Swampy gang and the Flagstons’ suburban hellscape coexist in a single universe of shared IP. Personally, I’m more intrigued by the comic book time effects: when the strip launched in 1954, Lois presumably had a birth date that would’ve put her roughly in the same demographic as her grandmother in the middle second row panel here. But what really makes this for me is Ditto looking cruelly at the cookie jar and whispering that delightfully batshit sentence at it, simultaneously erotic and threatening, the sort of thing that, if your parents overheard you saying it, they’d repeat it to every romantic partner you ever brought home for the rest of your life, to your mounting distress.

Beetle Bailey, 5/5/24

Elsehwere in the FlagstBaileyVerse, Killer is making a dating app profile! As much fun as the main body of the strip makes spinning a web of lies in an attempt to attract some hapless young woman seem, I must point your attention to Killer’s look of beaten-down resignation in the first throwaway panel. Being the most oversexed soldier in your unit is a job, and Killer is determined to be good at it, but like every job it wears on you after a while.

Mary Worth, 5/5/24

Maybe Killer doesn’t need to put so much work into this, though. After all, if the person you meet on the apps turns out to not be for you, you can always just smooch the nearest attractive service worker to fulfill your natural romantic needs! (Just kidding, if Killer tried this today he would immediately be arrested, because of woke.)

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Monday quickies

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Mary Worth, 4/29/24

Nothing but respect for this old man, who continues to mentally use some truly obscene epithet to refer to Wilbur even while acknowledging he saved his life. He knows Wilbur wasn’t trying! He’s still a @&^$!

Hi and Lois, 4/29/24

The way Hi is gingerly holding just the corner of that tape between his thumb and forefinger tells me that it contains the most vile pornography that you can possibly imagine.

Dennis the Menace, 4/29/24

Dennis, those words both rhyme with “grumpy?????” If your goal was to menace me by sending me into a spiral of extreme bafflement, congrats!

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More like Hi and Bankrupt, amiright

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Between Friends, 4/20/24

Not to sound like the old person that I literally am, but TV used to be a lot fewer two-hour movie premises stretched out over eight to ten 45-minute episodes and a lot more 85 episodes about friends just kind of hanging out and then, if they were popular enough to get a little budget boost, the occasional Very Special Episode where the gang all went on vacation to Italy together or something like that, to the genuine delight of their fans. Anyway, Between Friends is a strip that’s been running since 1994 and is about the titular friends just kind of hanging out, and Uncle Lumpy and I have posted about 17 times over the past 14 years, so you guys are probably fans of it by now, right? Well, the gals are going to Paris, so get excited!

Beetle Bailey, 4/20/24

This strip got me to Google “mouth taping for snoring” to discover that yes, this is a thing, and yes the photos that you get are all extremely disturbing, like even more than this weird creepy drawing of Sarge. One of the tape brands promoted for this is literally called “Hostage Tape!” Anyway fingers crossed that my wife, who claims that I snore (unproven), doesn’t read the blog today.

Hi and Lois, 4/20/24

Wow, Hi and Lois is leaning into becoming an experimental slice-of-life strip with no punchlines, huh? They could do worse, I guess. In other news, Lois’s business is failing!