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Hi and Lois, 7/31/22

OK, guys, I’m about to go all Pluggers here, but do you (for values of “you” that are as old as I am or older) remember those ads for Heinz gravy that had a tagline about how it was just like homemade, but with “no lumps”? I never understood that line as a kid, but I guess the point is that was as tasty as homemade but, since it had been produced in a gleaming factory rather than by a person in their kitchen like in olden times, it was free of any imperfections, a fully liquid nutritive slurry that slides down your gullet with ease. Anyway, based on Trixie’s line, I … guess this is kind of the joke here? “Ha ha, it’s just like a classic experience you thought you were going to have, but without an annoying part,” except the innovation here is not the industrial production of processed foods but rather the picnic table? It’s either that or we’re supposed to laugh about how Dot thought they were going to eat a picnic and then Lois felt a need to explain how they’re actually just eating at a table in their own backyard for four panels, which is kind of funny, but not “ha ha” funny.

Marvin, 7/31/22

Say what you will about Marvin, but there’s no question about what the joke is today: the joke is that Marvin is going to eat a truly bizarre and disgusting collection of food, and then, in a few hours, he’s going to expel the waste products from that food into his diaper and it will be both more disgusting than how it went in and more disgusting than his usual poops. That’s the joke! The joke is about his nasty shits. Thanks for “yuck”ing it up with Marvin for the past 40 years! (“Yuck” is a joke there because it’s used as a synonym for laughing but also is a noise you make when you experience visceral disgust; as long as you do one of those things, this strip has succeeded.)

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Dennis the Menace, 7/29/22

The punchline here is just supposed to be “ha ha Dennis is dumb/a child” but the arrangement of pieces on the board seems to indicate he and Mr. Wilson are pretty deep into this game considering Dennis is, what, five? Six? Maybe the comment is meant to indicate that Mr. Wilson can’t keep up with Dennis’s keen chess mastery, and Dennis is actually going to soon graduate from thrashing his elderly neighbors and move on to the high-stakes world of competitive chess, which, if the drama depicted in the The Queen’s Gambit, now streaming on Netflix, is any guide, would actually be a fairly menacing move on his part.

Dick Tracy, 7/29/22

Definitely one thing that doesn’t trigger my suspicions at all is when I am a stranger in an unusual community and a comely local lass I’ve just met offers to be my guide in showing me a mysteriously named local monument. I would fully expect to arrive at this “Fountain” and not be asked to participate in a ritual that nobody will tell me any details about, and if by chance I were asked, I feel confident that I could simply decline and receive no pushback about it. This evening is going to go great for Dick!

Hi and Lois, 7/29/22

Oh, stop whining, you two, if you want to court death to feel alive just do drugs like normal people

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Gasoline Alley, 7/23/22

Despite feeling obliged to read Gasoline Alley every day, I often fail to retain the details of its sprawling cast and their various problems, because honestly, why do that with my precious brain space when I could be doing literally anything else with it, but it’s slowly been dawning on me that the “Jimmy” who we recently saw ruining his sister’s sex life is the same kid who got a ride on a real live steam locomotive because he was dying of some unspecified terminal illness all the way back in 2014. I’m not sure if they somehow cured him in the interim and I just forgot or if the kid suffers from “Walt Syndrome,” a rare condition unique to the Alleyverse where a character lingers at the ege of death indefinitely without ever actually dying, but clearly Jimmy’s sister’s paramour is done with waiting. That’s why he’s turning to his grandfather Slim, who once got mad about some local teens playing basketball so he hired a guy to murder them by dropping a meteorite on them out of a helicopter. Slim knows from killing minors in elaborate space-themed “accidents,” in other words, and this rocketship built much faster than NASA ever could, with fewer safety features than NASA would ever be allowed to include, will do nicely.

Dick Tracy, 7/23/22

So whey would some faction of the now Earthbound race of Moon People want to turn their monstrous powers against Earth’s unsuspecting governments? Well, it turns out their Moon youth are being corrupted by anime. How else do you expect any self-respecting civilization to respond?

Hi and Lois, 7/23/22

Honestly respect how absolutely devastated Hi is by this. He’s been hanging on by a thread for a while now, but at least he thought that his family respected his grilling prowess. Now even that’s been taken from him, and there’s nothing left.