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Mary Worth, 10/25/22

Good (?) news, everybody: Zak didn’t fall to his death mid-selfie, or at least he hasn’t yet! No, he’s grabbed onto a cliffside branch, Sgt. Snorkel style, and now needs Iris to drag him to safety. There was a bit of dialogue in a strip last week in which Iris said she can easily handle this hike due to the “strength training” she’s been doing; I assume that, despite her current protests, she will eventually be able to rescue Zak, finding her power in an adrenaline-fueled burst like the stories you hear about mothers lifting up cars to save their children, which really fits in with the nature of their relationship.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/25/22

When Summer announced her plan to follow in her father’s footsteps and write a book, a lot of my commenters speculated that she would be following in her father’s footsteps and writing a book about her mother, Les’s dead wife Lisa. But, nope! Turns out she’s going to be writing about all the alive losers in her dumb loser town, which frankly seems like a much, much worse idea.

Hi and Lois, 10/25/22

I truly enjoy the fact that in panel one Lois and Irma are genuinely shocked by whorish athleisure fashions of the sort that used to be impossible in polite society but are now on sale at every department store, but in panel two they’ve managed to mediate their discomfort through an ironic quip to find their equilibrium. Do I enjoy the fact that this attitude has been grafted onto women who canonically cannot be past their early 40s, women who have never worn a girdle in their lives and whose mothers probably never did either? Well, no, but that is just a professional hazard of writing a blog about newspaper comics strips, where the assumed age of your audience is roughly 75.

Gasoline Alley, 10/25/22

Speaking of which, it is absolutely shocking to me that any character in Gasoline Alley is supposed to have seen a film made as recently as 2016. This strip is going to cause riots in the streets!

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Six Chix, 10/24/22

Ha ha, it’s a blood bank, get it? Get it? Anyway, what I find intriguing about this is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to insert a card into this blood ATM machine, which implies that some sort of socialistic vampire central committee is just handing out blood to vampires according to their needs; the vampires, in turn, must only take what they need, because otherwise it would rapidly run out, which speaks to a level of self-restraint that I don’t think is very well explored in the vampire mythos.

Hi and Lois, 10/24/22

I was about to make fun of this product placement by saying “You know what they should be selling is a Thirsty Thurston pint glass,” but it turns out that they are absolutely selling Thirsty Thurston pint glasses, so, you know what, well played, King Features.

Dennis the Menace, 10/24/22

Dennis is learning that if he just acts obnoxiously enough, he’ll drive away anyone who cares about him! Self-menace levels: high.

Blondie, 10/24/22

Interesting that Dagwood has a big glass of red wine as part of his “not different from any other day” work lunch. I guess this puts quite an interesting spin on the constant desk naps.

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Hi and Lois, 10/15/22

My first thought reading this was “Wow, who funded this strip?” because I refuse to believe that any ordinary person would just place pro-in-person-banking propaganda in dozens of newspapers just on a whim. It’s certainly not the banks themselves, who have been trying to shed the labor and facilities costs associated with bank branches since the ATM was invented. My guess is that the money trail either leads back either to the Communications Workers of America, the union that has organized tellers at bank branches in a number of cities, or some lobbying group of old people who absolutely refuse to figure out how to set up direct deposit for their Social Security checks.

Marvin, 10/15/22

So some guy who’s never been in the strip before? Just came out of the bathroom at Marvin’s house? And I guess he had never even heard of the concept of a bidet? So he just disassembled a fairly substantial plumbing appliance?? In somebody else’s house??? This is definitely one of the more puzzling ways for the great Marvin bidet caper to wrap up, and I must reluctantly respect it.