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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!”

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Shoe, 4/29/23

Sure, we make fun of legacy strips where the punchline is “Ha ha, technology, amiright?” a lot, but they do serve a valuable purpose, in that they show us what the artists think young people look like. In the case of the Shoe team, I guess it’s … beatniks? Kids today, playing the bongos and going to poetry readings and always texting on their damn phones?

Dick Tracy and Hi and Lois, 4/29/23

Shout out to these two strips for showing us the whole spectrum of male homosociality, from the horny (“Good lord, I’d like to bang that chick, but failing that I’d like to purchase the product she’s advertising”) to the wholesome (“We’re just whackin’ balls back and forth over the fence! It’s Saturday and the weather’s great, and we’re a little drunk”).

Gil Thorp, 4/29/23

No we didn’t see it because you didn’t draw it, do you not know how comics work