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Hi and Lois, 5/14/23

This is truly one of the wildest throwaway panels I’ve ever seen. Readers of space-constrained newspapers are just getting a classic Mother’s Day strip about how a mom’s work is truly the hardest of all, but those whose comics pages have room to spare know that just moments before he and the kids got assigned a bunch of chores, Hi thought that he was going to get a chance to give Lois a very special Mother’s Day gift (sex, with him).

Mary Worth, 5/14/23

OK, look, you have to approach today’s Mary Worth not in the context of this blog, where I’ve been making off-color jokes about the strip for going on 19 years now, but in the context of Mary Worth, the soap opera comic strip, one of the squarest forms of media ever created, and in that context the panel here where Mary says, in so many words, that Estelle thinks the sex with Dr. Ed is a lot better than the sex with Wilbur ever was, is positively pornographic.

The Phantom, 5/14/23

Way back in 2005, the Phantom had his Bandar henchmen erase the memory of a young woman who had inconveniently fallen in love with him using “Bandar medicine.” Anyway, turns out this practice, in addition to being obviously unethical in a number of ways, also doesn’t really work! Whoopsie! Awkward!

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Gil Thorp, 5/10/23

Still not sure what a “Milford juvenile sports program manager” is or does, but apparently it pays pretty well, enough to get a penthouse at the Gaston (?) Building in Milford’s hip, historic warehouse district. Although based on the anecdote we’ve stumbled into, which involves a teen singing Cab Calloway music, it’s possible that Kaz and Gil are just immortal and eternally young and have been coaching youth athletics for at least 80 years, and Kaz might simply derive his riches from decades of compound interest.

Dennis the Menace, 5/10/23

So if I’m interpreting this right, Henry is getting a birthday cake at a “party” attended only by his wife and son, who he sees every day anyway, and his son proclaims that he “took care of the icing!” for a cake that fairly obviously has no icing. The overall bleakness is in fact quite menacing!

Hi and Lois, 5/10/23

In a conference room at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC, a grim-faced business analyst is pointing at a PowerPoint slide with a graph on it. One line, labelled Marvin, keeps going up; another, labelled Hi and Lois, is in steady decline. Several of the assembled staff members are weeping openly, but others are clearly resolving themselves to do what they must.

Mary Worth, 5/10/23

Wow, this is quite a large boat that Jeff’s purchased, one that could accommodate a good number of passengers. Too bad they don’t have any friends! Seriously, who’s going to get an invite? Wilbur? Ian? Dr. Jeff’s son Dr. Drew lives with him so I’m sure they see quite enough of one another for everyone’s tastes. Guess he should’ve thought of that before he emptied out his 401k just to feel like a big shot for a single moment!

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Dustin, 5/1/23

A truly incredible thing to keep in mind about Dustin is that it’s a comic that debuted in January 2010, when, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, unemployment was higher than it had been at any time since the Great Depression, and its whole deal was that college grads who had to move home because they couldn’t find jobs were just lazy, entitled brats whose problems were entirely a product of their bad character. It’s really only today, with joblessness at historic lows, that the times have caught up with the strip’s premise, although now the economic big brains are loudly proclaiming that we need more unemployment in order to fight inflation, so maybe Dustin needs to start arguing that actually, by being unemployable, he’s helping in macroeconomic terms.

Hi and Lois, 5/1/23

In other generational warfare news, Hi is a white-collar suburban dad in a legacy comic strip so he feels like he should be a Boomer, but based on the age of his kids he’s probably in his mid-to-late 40s, and, you know what, usually us Gen Xers are just glad to be noticed, but I’m sorry, I will not sit here and be lectured to by Chip fucking Flagston of all people.

The Lockhorns, 5/1/23

You ever have an older relative that you remember always “taking a nap on the couch” during family functions when you were a kid, and you only realized later probably hated big gatherings in their house and self-medicated by getting drunk? Well, in unrelated news, Leroy has “run out of gas” during Loretta’s attempt to share a pleasant afternoon with him.

Dick Tracy, 5/1/23

This sounds like a great way for the Red Cross to destroy its role as a neutral aid organization and ensure that no government ever gave them access to POWs ever again! On the other hand, do we know for sure they didn’t do this for Axis POWs too? Maybe they were just opposed to the idea of holding prisoners of war in general.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/1/23

“This is Rex Morgan, M.D., for pete’s sake! Do you realize that something interesting briefly happened? Unacceptable!”