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Dustin, 6/24/23

Being a diagnosable Twitter addict, like I am, is not particularly rewarding, but it does provide you with a few fairly useless special powers. The ranks of Twitter addicts are fairly small — the number of daily users has never matched networks like Facebook or Instagram or TikTok — but is disproportionally made up of journalists and academics and tech “thought leaders,” so ideas and memes that originate on Twitter often eventually leak out into the real, non-Twitter, world, so one of those aforementioned useless powers is the ability to spot one of the aforementioned ideas/memes and think “Oh, no, this bastard is inflicting a bad Twitter thing on the hapless normies.” For a while, one of the bad Twitter things has been accounts that post pictures of Eastern European models in various contrived everyday situations accompanied with text like “You encounter this beautiful woman in the market. What is your romantic approach?” The goal for these accounts is either to push pickup artist bullshit or just get enough followers so that they can eventually pivot to crypto scam artistry, and I regret to inform you that it appears that at least someone at Dustin HQ has been sucked in.

Dick Tracy, 6/24/23

Dick Tracy hasn’t gone in for nightmarish ultraviolence in years, but current the creative team still likes to unsettle and disturb in their own way, like by offering unpleasant closeups of normal human mouths in action.

Hi and Lois, 6/24/23

This is a good addition to my “Hi and Lois is embracing Thirsty’s characterization as the neighborhood drunk” files. Honestly, the combination of the bright red nose and the fact that he’s clearly passed out in his lawn chair with his mouth hanging open while children gawk at him is a little too much! Getting a little grim! Might want to ratchet it back!

Judge Parker, 6/24/23

Good news, everyone! Sam and Abbey are going off on a trip together to have sex! Sam’s wearing a dumb baseball hat and they almost-matched their ecru shirts because that’s the sort of bland shit that really gets them going, I guess. Hopefully we’ll be treated to the same uncanny flavor of sexuality that marked their last recorded erotic encounter.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/24/23

“Oh, wow, you’ve managed to parry exactly one question with a confident but unquantified assertion. I’m sold!”

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Gil Thorp, 6/20/23

Some years back, the state of Maryland renamed the government agency in charge of courts, detention facilities, and parole supervision for kids under 18 from the “Department of Juvenile Justice” to the “Department of Juvenile Services,” and I can understand trying to get rid of a label that has punitive implications and maybe try to imply that you’re leaning towards rehabilitation, but (a) you can never win a race on the euphemism treadmill and (b) “Department of Juvenile Services” might falsely lead you to believe that the department was delivering services to young people that weren’t ultimately crime-and-punishment related. Anyway, I bring this up because I thought that was a pretty bad euphemism, but “Milford juvenile sports program manager” as a job title for a prison guard is frankly a lot worse.

Family Circus, 6/20/23

Now, obviously the joke here is that Jeffy is an idiot. But you have to admit that it does present us with a truly horrifying image of a world where children just a little older than Jeffy reach an age at which they lose their “child’s eyes” — maybe they cloud over and harden first, or maybe they just suddenly and painfully pop off the optic nerves, with the new, literate “adult” eyes emerging from bloody sockets over the next few excruciating weeks. This is a lot of body horror to just tell us that Jeffy’s an idiot, in other words, especially considering that most of us already knew that he was an idiot.

Hi and Lois, 6/20/23

The truly depressing thing here is that after nearly 70 years in publication, this strip hasn’t come up with enough of a personality for Ditto to give him a plausible joke.

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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!