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.

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.

Post Content

Dick Tracy, 5/18/23

A question I have often had reason to contemplate is “Who is [any given legacy comic strip still being produced in the year 2023] for, exactly,” and it’s pretty clear that the answer the current Dick Tracy creative team has landed on in their own case is “longtime fans of Dick Tracy and other classic comics and adjacent memorabilia.” Which is fine, really, but it does meant the strip can get loss in a self-referential haze now and then, producing storylines fully baffling to the uninitiated, like the occasional dreamworld interactions between Dick Tracy and Fearless Fosdick (seen on the right in panel one here). Fosdick was a long-running spoof of Dick Tracy in Al Capp’s Li’l Abner strip, and given how reverential towards the strip history modern Dick Tracy is overall, it’s kind of funny how often Fosdick shows up, because by “long-running spoof” I mean a not particularly friendly parody that Dick Tracy creator Chester Gould apparently hated. (Gould himself was lampooned as “Lester Gooch” in the multilayered narrative in which Fosdick appeared within Li’l Abner.) Anyway, today’s strip is truly incredible because it asks the question “What if Li’l Abner had lasted long enough that Fearless Fosdick could have spoofed the 1990 Dick Tracy movie,” and the answer it comes up with is “it would have a parody version of Madonna named ‘Fuddonna.’”

Hi and Lois, 5/18/23

I don’t know who Hi and Lois is for, really, but I’m excited to see the strip start to work its way through some serious philosophical problems. The Flagston children represent theological concepts of increasing sophistication: Trixie’s belief system is “God is visible in the sky and is my friend,” whereas Dot and Ditto think that God exists to hand out rewards and punishments based on a moral code that they’re capable of understanding, even though they disagree on the particulars. Can’t wait for us to get to Chip’s chapter in this saga; hopefully it’ll be some really esoteric and mystical stuff.