The Comics Curmudgeon

Main Menu

Social Media

Archive: Hi and Lois

Comments are closed

Mostly baseball

Post Content

Shoe, 5/25/23

I’m not sure if we’s supposed to understand here that Skyler is literally running away from home (if he is, he’s violating the cardinal rule that a runaway child in a comic must have a bindle over their shoulder) or if the Perfesser is staring morosely into his meatloaf a few seats up, leaving Skyler to engage in idle chitchat with a local old guy, who’s advising him on just kind of checking out on life and doing the least possible until death inevitably takes you.

Hi and Lois, 5/25/23

Speaking of coasting through your days, sports sure are fun when they’re easy! You’re not supposed to say this — giving your all and playing to the best of your ability are supposed to be their own rewards — but Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC doesn’t have patience for society’s meaningless pieties.

Gil Thorp, 5/25/23

Look, I’m not going to say that Milford High is weird, exactly, but I don’t think it’s quite normal for teens to be extremely supportive of a classmate who’s secretly going blind but then cruelly turn on him when the learn that his dad got caught up in a print media plagiarism scandal years earlier. How much could these kids care about journalism ethics? The media figure they have the most contact with is Marty Moon!

Comments are closed

Trixie will be rendered using what critics are calling “the most unsettling CGI yet”

Post Content

Six Chix, 5/24/23

Six Chix is a long-running feature that dares to ask the question, “What if women wrote a comic strip? What would we learn about the female sex in the process?” I think we can agree that the answer, if we’re just going by the content of Six Chix, is that women are floridly insane, but you have to admit that they’re more interesting than men, who are just annoying and boring.

Gil Thorp, 5/24/23

One of my tasks as the creator of a blog about newspaper comics, the most nostalgia-infected art form ever created, is to fight against the particularly pernicious type of nostalgia that leads people to say that the past is always better than the present. Like, for instance, longtime Thorp-heads probably would smugly say that, in terms of unpaid randos who helped coach the Mudlark baseball team, it wouldn’t get any funnier than a guy who called himself Clambake and lied about being in the Negro Leagues. And yet today, in this supposedly fallen year 2023, we have a blind guy urging two blindfolded teenagers to hurl baseballs in his general direction, simultaneously! Truly, I tell you that we still live in an age of wonders.

Hi and Lois, 5/24/23

I know the media landscape is troubled and subject to ongoing corporate consolidation, but I don’t know that teasing the idea of an incredible crossover between Spider-Man and his Avengers Pals with the Walker-Browne Extended Universe is the best way for King Features Syndicate parent company Hearst Communications to solicit a takeover bid from the Walt Disney Company.

Comments are closed

Can’t stop staring at that blatantly traced grill

Post Content

Blondie and Hi and Lois, 5/20/23

As a participant in the childfree lifestyle, I appreciate what representation I can find in the comics, even if it’s just Dagwood and Blondie’s best only friends Herb and Tootsie, or Hi and Lois’s best friends Hi’s coworker Thirsty and his wife Irma, who they keep at arm’s length. Anyway, Thirsty has at least come round to his opinion on procreation based on hard experience over a too-short fence, whereas Herb seems to be guessing at “parenting” activities based on movies he saw 20 years ago.

Judge Parker, 5/20/23

Oh, right, remember Eric, the traumatized son of the murderous meth judge? Well, his dad went to jail and now he’s living with Abbey, or maybe with Abbey’s horses. Abbey has been “feeling lost” ever since her dumb business venture, her political career, and her marriage all failed, but she has an idea, if Sophie is willing the help! (The idea is using Eric and Sophie to breed a new “master race” of weird sad foundling kids who ended up on Abbey’s ranch for whatever reason.)

Beetle Bailey, 5/20/23

OK, so the bad news is that we’re fighting another war, but the good news is that after like 70-plus years, the military has determined that Beetle is finally adequately trained to fight in it.