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Sam and Silo, 8/12/24

Man, for a brief and shining moment, I thought we were going to start the week with a truly exciting Sam and Silo moment. “Now what?” asks the mayor. “Look at our badges, Mayor,” Sam replies. “We are the armed forces of this town, those dedicated to protecting the community from violence with violence, decorated to reflect the honor in the eyes of the people that this status bestows upon us. It’s up to us to push aside the degenerate ‘leaders’ produced by the failed democratic system and bring the unified and purified nation forward into modernity and success. You’re under arrest for treason and there will be no trial.” Unfortunately, instead we’re just setting up more comical Sam vs. Silo squabbling. As if that’s going to do anything to help replace the collapsing liberal consensus with the New Order!

Hi and Lois, 8/12/24

You think at first that the reason why the twins want to put a stop to this little reverie is obvious: their parents are imagining a universe where their kids never existed and, to judge based on their facial expressions, are absolutely loving it. But in fact, it’s much bleaker: the children demand an absolute monopoly on the whimsical contemplation of any counterfactual scenarios within the household. Adults are restricted to linear, reality-based thought processes that can help them be economically productive and provide for their children. You can see why visualizing a child-free household is so appealing to Hi and Lois, which ironically makes it all the more important to the kids that they put an immediate stop to such thoughtcrime.

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Alice, 8/7/24

The thing is that your boy Josh came down with COVID-19 last weekend, and while I am currently on the mend it made my brain a little loopy this week (this Alice strip is here to show you what it was like inside my skull for a while) and also apparently interfered with my ability to operate the ol’ time travel machine. This meant I posted Thursday’s strips on Wednesday and (briefly) posted tomorrow’s (Friday’s) strips Thursday (the day on which I am writing this Wednesday post). Ooops! I’ve corrected the dates on everything on the site (so it goes in the right order), but here’s a short Wednesday post, for completeness!

Dennis the Menace, 8/7/24

Sure, Mr. Wilson, I get it. There are lots of times when I think up a joke, but doing it right involves figuring out some specific pieces of information, like “What’s a typical amount that a child Dennis’s age weighs” and “Wait, how old is Dennis supposed to be, actually,” and then I just don’t bother. This is frankly the most relatable this man has ever been to me.

Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois, 8/7/24

Oh no, Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC has learned what “influencers” are and will be making jokes about them, code red code red

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Marvin, 8/4/24

We all find ways to justify our worst life decisions to ourselves. Like, just for example, imagine you’ve spent 20 years of your life reading and writing about the comic strip Marvin, despite the fact that you obviously profoundly dislike it. You can try to defend yourself by being smug that you’re now intimately acquainted with the Marvin lore, that you’ve kept track of information like the fact that Marvin has a cousin named Ming Ming who was adopted from China, even if the strip creators themselves seem to have forgotten. But then a few weeks later you get blindsided by the revelation that “Megan,” who I’ve always filed away in my mind as one of the random other babies Marvin goes to pre-school with, is also his cousin? And Ming Ming’s sister? I am reeling, and humbled. Has this always been the case, or did they retcon this just to spite me personally?

Hi and Lois, 8/4/24

Two things I love about Lois’s Paris fantasy is that (a) she’s imagining going during the Olympics and assumes the city will be more or less empty and (b) she has 100% left her entire family behind in America, possibly not even telling them where she was going.