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Dustin, 9/21/22

A thing about doing a comic strip every day for years and years is that keeping up with whatever “high concept” you used to sell the thing in the first place gets exhausting, so eventually you just start having characters say whatever jokes you or your gag writers can come up with or have maybe heard from someone else, ignoring more and more frequently the fact that they’re birds or whatever. Dustin’s been around for more than a decade now, so hopefully we’re getting closer and closer to the blessed moment where it stops being a Millennial vs. Boomer battle and just features its various generic characters driving around and reciting forwarded email jokes to one another.

Gasoline Alley, 9/21/22

Wow, it’s really sad that sexually aggressive frog-demons go unpunished in this strip, while we’re treated to images of innocent trees screaming in agony as they burn to death!

Gil Thorp, 9/21/22

Oh snap! Heather Burns is in her first week on the job as Marjie Ducey’s replacement and she’s already shaking up the staid Milford Star’s ways by live-tweeting the game! This would be a real threat to Marty Moon’s radio show if he still had a radio show, but I’m pretty sure he’s just up there in a peach crate, yelling into a headset that isn’t connected to anything.

Hi and Lois, 9/21/22

Wait, who the hell was Thirsty texting? His only friend is Hi and he hates his wife, so I don’t … ohhhh, he was in the bathroom with his phone “texting,” got it.

Mary Worth, 9/21/21

No, Wilbur! This woman works with dogs all day, so you can’t use dogs to flirt with her! Plus you don’t even have a dog yet! You’re swinging into action too soon! Bad Wilbur! Bad! [whacks Wilbur’s nose with a rolled-up newspaper]

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Hi and Lois, 9/17/21

Do teen boys still, in the year 2021, lie around their bedrooms, decorated with Stones and Led Zep posters, and talk about how bands today suck? I mean, they did when I was a teen in the ’90s, which was also decades after those bands had been relevant, so I don’t see why they wouldn’t now, but I admit that I don’t have any personal insight into the subject. I certainly hope little brothers of teen boys still lurk in the hallway outside their rooms, ready to strut in sassily with a perfect cutting sitcom-quality bon mot, because otherwise I will despair over the direction of today’s youth.

Family Circus, 9/17/21

Sure, you would think Big Daddy Keane would take this opportunity to unceremoniously plop his son on the other side of the fence and then power-walk away from his family forever, but I don’t think the desire to do that iss the emotion being conveyed by his facial expression here. It’s more a look of pure panic, as if he’d do anything to stop whatever sort of blubbering, weeping noise Jeffy is making, which should give all of us pause about whatever sort of blubbering, weeping noise Jeffy is capable of making.

Pardon My Planet, 9/17/21

I don’t really talk about Pardon My Planet very much, but on a day where one of its interchangeable characters spins an erotic description of a very fuckable armadillo, could I really ignore it? I mean, I probably could, most days, but the comics fodder is a little thin today. I just wrung a paragraph out of Jeffy crying, for pete’s sake. Anyway, like I said, this guy wants to fuck an armadillo, but what’s really sad is that he’s ashamed of it so he tries to project conventional feminine attributes onto the poor fantasy beast as if that places his desires within the bounds of traditional heteronormativity, when in fact it just makes it all much, much worse.

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Hi and Lois, 7/30/21

“Gosh, I wish there were continuing storylines in Hi and Lois,” said … someone? One of you, maybe? Well, here you go, it turns out that one of the defining features of Chip’s teenage years is the conflict between spending time with pretty blondes or redheads and spending time mowing the yard in order to earn money to subsidize the spending associated with the aforementioned time with girls. Riveting stuff from America’s funny pages!

Gil Thorp, 7/30/21

This summer’s Gil Thorp is doing a fascinating experiment: can it weave a plotline out of golf jargon that is 100% opaque to me, a non-golf-fan, and still keep me, a Gil Thorp superfan, involved? I’m gonna hold on for dear life and see what happens! The closest analogue to reading this that I can think of is when I’m watching something on TV that’s in a foreign language with subtitles, and I absent-mindedly start looking at something on my phone and realize I haven’t understood anything anyone’s said for the past minute or two but have been kind of following along just based on the emotional cadence of people’s voices. Today’s panel two is putting an additional degree of difficulty in place by having the golf-jargon-speaker block a big chunk of his face with his hand so I can’t tell if he’s smiling or frowning or what, but I’m up to the challenge!