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Alice, 8/7/24

The thing is that your boy Josh came down with COVID-19 last weekend, and while I am currently on the mend it made my brain a little loopy this week (this Alice strip is here to show you what it was like inside my skull for a while) and also apparently interfered with my ability to operate the ol’ time travel machine. This meant I posted Thursday’s strips on Wednesday and (briefly) posted tomorrow’s (Friday’s) strips Thursday (the day on which I am writing this Wednesday post). Ooops! I’ve corrected the dates on everything on the site (so it goes in the right order), but here’s a short Wednesday post, for completeness!

Dennis the Menace, 8/7/24

Sure, Mr. Wilson, I get it. There are lots of times when I think up a joke, but doing it right involves figuring out some specific pieces of information, like “What’s a typical amount that a child Dennis’s age weighs” and “Wait, how old is Dennis supposed to be, actually,” and then I just don’t bother. This is frankly the most relatable this man has ever been to me.

Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois, 8/7/24

Oh no, Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC has learned what “influencers” are and will be making jokes about them, code red code red

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Marvin, 8/4/24

We all find ways to justify our worst life decisions to ourselves. Like, just for example, imagine you’ve spent 20 years of your life reading and writing about the comic strip Marvin, despite the fact that you obviously profoundly dislike it. You can try to defend yourself by being smug that you’re now intimately acquainted with the Marvin lore, that you’ve kept track of information like the fact that Marvin has a cousin named Ming Ming who was adopted from China, even if the strip creators themselves seem to have forgotten. But then a few weeks later you get blindsided by the revelation that “Megan,” who I’ve always filed away in my mind as one of the random other babies Marvin goes to pre-school with, is also his cousin? And Ming Ming’s sister? I am reeling, and humbled. Has this always been the case, or did they retcon this just to spite me personally?

Hi and Lois, 8/4/24

Two things I love about Lois’s Paris fantasy is that (a) she’s imagining going during the Olympics and assumes the city will be more or less empty and (b) she has 100% left her entire family behind in America, possibly not even telling them where she was going.

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Hi and Lois, 7/31/24

Trixie Flagston has, notoriously, been a baby for nearly 70 years, longer than most of us have been alive, and thought-balloons in complete sentences, so we think of her as having the mental capacity, knowledge, and experience of a much older child, or maybe even an adult. But if we are to take the narrative of the strip at face value, she is a baby, probably less than a year old, and we must therefore assume that she is constantly encountering new concepts and categories of object for the first time. Like today, for instance: she hears Ditto say “blocks” and assumes this castle will be made out of the stackable wooden cubes that she’s accustomed to smashing into and scattering with delight. Little does she know that these are new, unfamiliar Lego blocks, which will snap securely together, and which were possibly acquired by the twins specifically to protect their creations from their disruptive little sister! Surely that smug grin will be wiped off Trixie’s face when Dot or Ditto simply turns their castle back upright after Trixie’s attack, and a new a distressing fact about the world will settle into her mind.

Dick Tracy, 7/31/24

Hey, remember that guy who was being blackmailed over some salacious photos and was paying his mustachio’d blackmailer in cryptocurrency? Well, it turns out he owns a baseball team, or runs some other kind of “enterprise” for which he reports to the Commissioner of Baseball. Would that have made this storyline more interesting, if we had learned it earlier, before the MCU arrested all the bad guys? Maybe! But I guess we’ll never know, now.