Archive: Hi and Lois

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Blondie, 5/12/22

You ever stare at a sentence for a long stretch of time and become increasingly convinced that it doesn’t really make sense as something a native speaker of 21st century American English would say? Probably not, as you don’t have a semi-successful comics blog you’ve got to churn out content for every day, but the point is that “How much are you wanting?” fell into that category, for me, until I finally convinced myself that it would sound right if it were in a comical fake Irish accent from an old-timey movie. “How much are ye wanting then, lads?” See, doesn’t that sound better? Or at least funnier? Wouldn’t it be funnier if Dagwood spoke in a comical Irish accent? Have I finally cracked the code necessary to read Blondie every day and find it funny, after all these years?

Hi and Lois, 5/12/22

“Is that why your face is constantly immobile, your mouth perpetually in an O of surprise? The price of beauty is wearing a dead mask, every day of your life?”

The Lockhorns, 5/12/22

The long, unkempt beards of Greek philosophers were meant to signify that they were so invested in the life of the mind that they couldn’t be bothered to concern themselves with ordinary, quotidian matters like hygiene, and in the early 20th century, many men at Ivy League colleges indulged in a similar aesthetic impulse for similar reasons, making a vogue out of a disheveled, slovenly style of dress. In the 1940s, students at the elite women’s colleges cast off their girdles and began to imitate their male counterparts, and a key part of their new uniform was a baggy cardigan referred to as a “sloppy joe sweater.” This is a long-winded way of me saying that fine, I admit it, I was wrong, the Lockhorns are definitely not Millennials.

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Dustin, 5/6/22

Dustin is a truly amazing strip, one whose whole purpose is to poke fun of the foibles of young people despite clearly having no real sense of how young people live their lives, and one of the ways this manifests, as I have frequently griped, is that the young people characters go to fern bars in order to seek out romantic entanglements, like it’s the god-damned Reagan Administration or something. I guess some garbled communication has filtered back to Dustin HQ that modern hookup culture is entirely focused on dating apps now, which could explain why this young lady is at a fern bar but also on her laptop for some reason.

Hi and Lois, 5/6/22

I was going to make fun of Hi for seeming so shocked that Chip and his date might go dutch, but then I realized he has that same slack-jawed befuddled look in panel one as the conversation begins, too. Honestly, he looks like that a lot of the time! That Hi Flagston, just a befuddled dipshit stumbling his way through life on the funny pages!

Pluggers, 5/6/22

Ha ha, I absolutely love the look on that dog-man’s face. It’s gonna be real horror show in that house and this guy knows it.

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Gil Thorp, 4/8/22

Gil Thorp generally hews pretty closely to the holy trinity of football, basketball, and baseball/softball, but every once in a while it tries another sport out for size and I always appreciate it. Today the Milford baseballers are coming out to support tennis star Charis (?) Tompkins, and going on a journey of learning about when and where it’s appropriate to cheer in different sports. A fun fact is that my niece was a pretty high-level gymnast in high school and I went to one of her meets once and very quickly discovered that you are not supposed to loudly boo your team’s opponents, who knew, ha ha! You can’t blame me, my sole experience with competitive gymnastics at the time was a 2006 Gil Thorp storyline where one little girl just starts punching another little girl in the face in the middle of a meet.

Mary Worth, 4/8/22

Ha ha, yes, this dream sequence is shaping up to be exactly as bananas as I’d hoped! Cal looming erotically/threatening over Toby, staring into nothing with dead heart eyes, while the salmon sky burns behind him? The best part is that it’s Friday and we’re really just getting started, which I hope means we have another solid week of this.

Hi and Lois, 4/8/22

The newspaper comics are essentially an art form created by, and mostly for, those middle aged and older, so a lot of it ends being about how the kids today aren’t as cool as the kids used to be. Normally that’s not my jam, but I gotta admit, when they’re right, they’re right.