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Archive: Hi and Lois

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High-falutin’ Sunday

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Hi and Lois, 10/20/24

It’s a bold choice to have Hi and Lois make direct eye contact with you, the reader, in the final panel here. This isn’t just a cute domestic scene; it’s a polemical tract, tailored to urge all of us to not be so quick to “tidy” that we purge beloved memories of our past. Frankly, I’m glad I didn’t read this before I spent a lot of time and energy reorganizing my closet a couple weekends ago, as I’d probably still have a bunch of shirts I never wear hanging up in there. “Let’s leave it! It’s a time capsule!” I’d tell my increasingly irritated wife.

Family Circus, 10/20/24

The Family Circus’ bread and butter is what I like to call “darndest thing saying,” which is the Keane Kids trying to explain some aspect of the world or talk like a smart adult but fucking it up very badly, due to idiocy. However, today’s installment makes a fatal misstep, because one of the darndest things they say is actually correct! We really do call autumn “fall” because of falling leaves — in fact, the original phrase was “fall of the leaf.” Does Billy, like me, spend his time entertaining himself exploring word origins on the Online Etymology Dictionary site? If so, he probably enjoyed learning that “autumn” comes to us from Latin but may ultimately have an Etruscan root, and that there is in fact no common Indo-European word for the period between summer and winter, which may imply that the steppe herders of the proto-Indo European urheimat did not perceive it as a distinct season.

Mary Worth, 10/20/24

I think Wilbur has finally hit his logical endpoint as a character: he has become the human embodiment of rock bottom. The prospect of marrying him is so vile and horrifying as to make literally any alternate scenario seem preferable. The middle panel in the bottom row comes from Estelle’s fictional dreamscape, but I assume it will haunt your very real nightmares tonight, as it will mine.

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Walker-Browne strips to kick off your weekend

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Beetle Bailey, 10/18/24

This Beetle Bailey honestly feels kind of grim to me, as banal as it seems on the surface. Sure, Sarge is joking around with Beetle in a way that alludes, in a vaguely threatening manner, to the power he holds over his subordinates, as is his wont, but he’s not glowering or even looking up from his paperwork to make eye contact as he does it. Instead, he’s efficiently taking care of some of his less glamorous duties as a non-commissioned officer and not getting overly emotionally involved in Beetle’s day-to-day life. Maybe all the work he did with Dr. Bonkus on his anger issues finally paid off.

Hi and Lois, 10/18/24

Sorry, Trixie! You’re damned to eternal infancy, and while your baby’s brain may somehow generate adult-level cognition, you will never develop even rudimentary speech capabilities. That means you can’t engage in sophisticated bargaining with your brother in scenarios like this. Thought balloons won’t cut it!

Hagar the Horrible, 10/18/24

Uhhh, no? Because it’s facing the other way? And because of gravity? Idiot.

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Thursday is for phones

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Dick Tracy, 10/17/24

One of the subtler conundrums created by the “comic-book time” phenomenon is the question of how the characters themselves experience it. Like, is Dick Tracy a guy in his late 40s or early 50s who’s been battling weird deformed gangsters for a couple decades? Or did he, like the comic that bears his name, come into existence in 1938, meaning that he’s been at this longer than most of us have been alive, and he’s tired, so tired, of these weirdos’ whole deal? His attitude in today’s strip really suggests the latter. “Oh, what’s that, is there a new hitman in town? A real freak with a mirror for a face who calls himself Mr. Mirror? Should I get excited? Scared? Should I even bother pulling my gun out of my pocket? No, go ahead and answer that call, I can wait.”

Dennis the Menace, 10/17/24

There’s a lot that bugs me about the characterization of Margaret in Dennis the Menace, but a big one is that they need to decide which misogynist stereotype she is exactly. Is she a prissy, humorless, controlling know-it-all and shrew? Or is she empty-headed, vapid, and vain? I feel she veers wildly from lane to lane and they need to pick one.

Hi and Lois, 10/17/24

Ha ha, yes, the teens! The teens are the ones with the phone problem! Definitely not me, a 50-year-old man, or adults younger than me, or adults older than me! None of us have unhealthy relationships with our devices, and definitely social gatherings of mature adults feature exactly as much staring at small screens with varying degrees of surreptitiousness as they did 15 years ago! It’s the teens, I tell ya, the teens!