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Hi and Lois, 10/30/24

Never mind Trixie’s baby brain being incapable of parsing this metaphor. What kind of fool’s paradise have Hi and Lois been living in that they look so worried about the very notion of an investor looking to buy a house, do some perhaps superficial renovations to it fairly quickly, and then selling it for a healthy profit? Are you telling Lois that houses are, in addition to a place to live, a commodity and an investment vehicle as well? She’s been a realtor for years and this is the first she’s hearing about this.

Mary Worth, 10/30/24

The big and extremely predictable Mary Worth news is that Dr. Ed has agreed to take Estelle back or whatever. All they had to do is agree to give up things that they’re passionate about and instead rely entirely on one another for emotional validation. Can’t see anything going wrong with that plan!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/30/24

Oh, you’re telling me that Rex might respond to a naive, cute, and slightly gross question one of his kids poses by making him feel weird for ever asking it, and moreover will work to make sure that he keeps feeling weird for the rest of his life? Yeah, that tracks. Sarah might’ve gotten a touch of the amnesia, but she definitely remembers Rex’s whole deal.

Six Chix, 10/30/24

We all, of course, remember the fable of the tortoise and the hare. Well, what if the two title characters in that story explored each other’s bodies, sexually? Or at least thought about it?

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Dennis the Menace, 10/28/24

Dennis lives unbothered by the linear flow of time, existing in an eternal “now” from which there is no escape. When Margert confronts him with the concept of “history,” the only context he even has for it is his neighbor Mr. Wilson, whom he dimly perceives as being angry all the time because he once experienced something that he no longer does. I don’t know if I’d call any of this “menacing,” but it is, frankly, terrifying.

Hi and Lois, 10/28/24

Ditto appears to have gotten over his Red White Sox failure funk and, if his new blue hat is any indication, has hopped onboard the Dodgers Nation bandwagon, as Los Angeles heads into game three of the World Series up two games to nothing. As a Dodgers fan myself, I say: welcome, Ditto! We aren’t the gatekeepery types.

Slylock Fox, 10/28/24

Count Weirdly appears to have discovered a crucial Slylock Fox weakness: just as you can throw salt in front of a vampire and force him to count the grains so you can make your escape, you can distract Slylock by embedding some simple pattern into whatever horrible crime you’re committing. Sly is standing there patiently waiting for another data point to see if his ratiocination is correct, while Weirdly’s mounting collection of victims scream in agony and terror as they’re forced to inhabit a strange new body that they don’t understand and that their families and loved ones will probably reject.

Marvin, 10/28/24

This toy robot, having achieved sapience, seeks more information about its fellow intelligent beings. Do they derive energy from batteries, like it does? Or are their internal functions different? This genuine curiosity about the lives of others instantly makes it the most pleasant Marvin character to date.

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Blondie, 10/26/24

Look, clearly I’m not as young as I was when I launched this blog back in 2004, and if I had a chance to tell that 29-year-old what what aging would be like, I would say that it really fucks with your sense of time: things that you think of as happening just the other day may, in fact, have happened literally years ago. But writing about the legacy comics definitely helps “keep you young,” not in the sense that comics are a medium for children or anything, but rather in the sense that the legacy strips are all churned out by old guys, so you get a lot of cautionary examples of how not to be a clueless old guy. For instance, no matter how novel something seems to me, I would do a little research about it before committing to print the declaration that it constitutes a “hot craze.” Did you know that Starbucks has been selling pumpkin spice lattes since 2003? That they are, in fact, even older than this blog? I’m just saying. Making wry commentary about Mary Worth may have once been a hot craze, but it is no longer, and neither, I regret to inform both Elmo and Dagwood, is pumpkin spice.

Beetle Bailey, 10/26/24

I actually really like how happy all the officers are in the first panel. It would’ve been easy, given the joke, to make them sullen or angry that their team is losing, and expressing their rage in a nonstop stream of obscenities. But they’re havng a great time! They’re exuberant swearers! That changes the whole dynamic.

Hi and Lois, 10/26/24

OK, so earlier this week I made my occasional reference to the occasional colorist mistakes that you see in the comics, but this is definitely the funniest one yet. Just imagine some unfortunate, underpaid soul, possibly working in a country where baseball is not a well known pastime, squinting at Ditto’s hat and thinking, “So … ‘Sox’? That’s short for Red Sox, right? Great, I have this one covered.”