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Hi and Lois, 9/11/23

Sometimes it can be easy to forget that we live in an age of technological wonders. For instance, if you have a leak in your house, you can contact a plumbing professional, send them a photo or video of the problem, and have them give a preliminary diagnosis and estimate, all without the need for them to make the trip out to your house. Hi and Lois absolutely hate this, for some reason.

Dennis the Menace, 9/11/23

Not sure if this guy is supposed to be the Mitchells’ minister (in which case their denomination’s clergy has undergone a significant sartorial downgrade in the last few years) or just some hapless victim Dennis has decided to annoy while Henry and Alice stand idly by doing nothing to stop him, but that is the face of a man who is either unable to politely get away from a little moron who’s so theologically misguided that he reinvented Scientology, or the face of a guy who isn’t listening to anything that little moron is saying because he has to take a huge dump. I guess it could be both.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/11/23

Look, Rene, the days which you’d get paid for your musical talents and flim-flam schemes in cash or cocaine are over, you current operate as part of an interconnected network of specialized professionals, so get used to it and stop kidnapping people.

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Hi and Lois, 9/2/23

If you want a glimpse of how in mid-century America, syndicated newspaper cartooning used to be your ticket to a comfortable life, consider the central position the great suburban participatory leisure sports of golf and tennis hold in our legacy strips! It’s a different time now, but these strips can still teach us a lot about the folkways of suburban Connecticut and similar communities, and if I’m reading today’s Hi and Lois right, those places are on the verge of civil war. Hi thinks he can just ride this one out on the golf course, but there will come a time, and soon, where he’ll have to take a side.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/2/23

Oh ho, it looks like Rene, aka “Professor Mirakle,” is back to tie up some loose ends, possibly by murdering his erstwhile disciple Mud! Ha ha, everyone will be real sorry they didn’t accept his apologies, once they find his bullet-ridden corpse in this hotel room three days from now! Honestly, though, it seems much more likely that Rene is just trying to get a cut of the money from Mud’s apparently quite lucrative Li’l Fergus character and the songs he co-wrote and/or inspired through fake guru powers. It would be funny to see an attempted murderer make use of the legal system to enforce his intellectual property claims, but honestly, it’s not like he hasn’t done it before.

Between Friends, 9/2/23

Sorry to this lady who is being abandoned by all her friends and family, but I will never get over the phrase “We live in a global world.” Do we? Is it a global world we live in? Is it really? Is that why you can use a globe to depict the world with such uncanny accuracy?

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Hi and Lois, 8/29/23

Look, I’m just a simple city boy who’s always had his trash collected by a municipal service department, and I don’t understand the wily ways of suburbia with its advanced public-private partnerships and such. That’s why the relationship between Hi and his garbagemen has always puzzled me, as it’s often implied that he’s paying them directly in some way? I always assumed they were contracted by his HOA or something, but now that I find out that it’s actually some kind of anarcho-capitalist situation where different suppliers compete for dominance both by offering superior service for better prices and by using violence to intimidate or eliminate their competitors, I have to admit that I’m a lot more interested.

Blondie, 8/29/23

If you’ve read this blog long enough, you know that inside me are two wolves: one that gripes “Ugh, this long-running legacy comic has been beating the same joke into the ground for decades” and the other that gripes “Wait, this is out of character! Why isn’t this long-running legacy comic strip character using one of the beloved jokes he’s been doing for decades?” Anyway, today the second wolf has triumphed, and I have to say I’m disappointed that the punchline here is “Ha ha, wouldn’t it be funny if men liked reality TV?” rather than the reveal being that Dagwood was watching America’s Next Top Sandwich or The Real Sandwiches Of Beverly Hills or Love Is Blind And Also They Eat Sandwiches or something.

Dennis the Menace, 8/29/23

Alice shaming her son for not having any friends to play with? A rare menace reversal here.

Dick Tracy, 8/29/23

“A real piece of shit. We all wanted him dead and whoever did this to him should get a medal. Frankly I’m pretty furious the coroner called you down here. Nobody in this locker room is going to testify at trial.”