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Between Friends, 10/5/23

Many years ago, when I first started this blog, it was called “I Read The Comics So You Don’t Have To,” and sometimes I feel I’ve lost sight of that missions, so, here you go: Between Friends has been doing an on-again-off-again plot for it seems like weeks where Susan here is on Zoom with a coworker who has young kids and is very excited about getting away from them for a few days on a work trip. This is, I do not deny, hashtag relatable, but there’s just been so much of it, and if you’re just seeing this strip in isolation, you’re probably like, “I don’t see why it’s worth complaining about,” but trust me: I have read the comics so you don’t have to, and I’m here to tell you that it’s gotten real old and shows no sign of not getting older. I feel like today’s strip, which is just a bunch of dialogue coming out of a computer screen while a person makes various facial expressions in response, is particularly egregious. There’s a lot to say about the post-lockdown persistence of white collar work-from-home jobs, and as a longtime home office worker I’m generally in favor of the trend, but it’s a real problem for comic strips that rely on people interacting at work for visual interest.

Hi and Lois, 10/5/23

Man, I wish I could get as excited about anything as this child is hearing an old man talk about the last 30 years of technological progress! Or, well, given the medium and its current readership, I guess I should say I wish I could get as excited about anything as this child is in this fantasy deliberately engineered to make old people feel like children might be interested in what they have to say.

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Mary Worth, 10/1/23

OK, I had a whole thing ready to go here about how the Sunday strips represent Mary’s self-aggrandizing memories/interpretations of events but the daily strips represent reality, because earlier this week Mary nosily asked Keith whether he had any family, yet in today’s version of the sequence we see him offering that information freely. But those thoughts were immediately blasted from my mind by the revelation that Keith has a SECRET (maybe even secret to him???) CHILD who has managed to track him down after only a few days in his new home. Maybe because Mary was tweeting about him nonstop on the official Charterstone Twitter account that she set up after Wilbur taught her to use social media? Anyway, I hope everyone is going to be curious and not judgmental about Keith’s unorthodox family situation!

Hi and Lois, 10/1/23

In 2011, the Huffington Post published an article entitled “What time does the Superbowl start?” which became legendary among those of us who toil in the mines of internet content for its naked understanding that internet publishing was about finding the answers to things people were looking for in the next ten seconds, not crafting clever headlines or providing in-depth information or whatever. It’s a milestone that probably passed unnoticed to most normies, even though we now live in a world mostly spawned by the same engine, where, for instance, physical restaurants have names like “Thai Food Near Me.” Anyway, more than a decade later, it seems that Hi and Lois is trying to get into the search engine optimization game, sadly unaware that Google does not index text in image files.

Dennis the Menace, 10/1/23

Oh, Henry! It seems that you’ve achieved every good thing in your life only as an act of revenge against those who doubted you

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Crock, 9/27/23

It might seem incongruent to think of colonizers as sentimental, but many have a certain image of the colonized as a backwards but noble people over whom they must regretfully take a parental role. This rarely survives a collision with actual flesh-and-blood colonial subjects, who are in fact real people who when given the opportunity will quickly become just as addicted to screentime as you are.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/27/23

Damn, after breaking him down emotionally, Mud and Buzz are strong-arming Rene into signing his intellectual property over to them before turning himself in for a long prison sentence, with only a vague promise of an unspecified “cut” of any profits. Sounds like Mud Mountain is back to being a jerk again, which, ironically, makes his character interesting again, so I say, keep grifting the grifter, buddy!

Hi and Lois, 9/27/23

Big news, everyone! After nearly 70 years trapped in a timeless stasis, Trixie Flagston has finally grown just a little bit larger! Or maybe she finally crapped her pants for the first time, who’s to say, the temporo-biological aspects of legacy comics are mysterious and frankly distasteful.

Gasoline Alley, 9/27/23

Wait, what? After a little light mauling those government agents have just given up on reclaiming this human child from its ursine captor? The America I believe in doesn’t negotiate with terrorists — or, should I say, bearroris[a giant vaudeville hook drags me off stage]