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Hi and Lois, 7/31/24

Trixie Flagston has, notoriously, been a baby for nearly 70 years, longer than most of us have been alive, and thought-balloons in complete sentences, so we think of her as having the mental capacity, knowledge, and experience of a much older child, or maybe even an adult. But if we are to take the narrative of the strip at face value, she is a baby, probably less than a year old, and we must therefore assume that she is constantly encountering new concepts and categories of object for the first time. Like today, for instance: she hears Ditto say “blocks” and assumes this castle will be made out of the stackable wooden cubes that she’s accustomed to smashing into and scattering with delight. Little does she know that these are new, unfamiliar Lego blocks, which will snap securely together, and which were possibly acquired by the twins specifically to protect their creations from their disruptive little sister! Surely that smug grin will be wiped off Trixie’s face when Dot or Ditto simply turns their castle back upright after Trixie’s attack, and a new a distressing fact about the world will settle into her mind.

Dick Tracy, 7/31/24

Hey, remember that guy who was being blackmailed over some salacious photos and was paying his mustachio’d blackmailer in cryptocurrency? Well, it turns out he owns a baseball team, or runs some other kind of “enterprise” for which he reports to the Commissioner of Baseball. Would that have made this storyline more interesting, if we had learned it earlier, before the MCU arrested all the bad guys? Maybe! But I guess we’ll never know, now.

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Dustin, 7/29/24

Absolutely one of the most heartbreaking things about Dustin is that Dustin’s dad is a cruel asshole who will never love his son, and Dustin is a contemptible slacker who will never get his life together in a way that might cause his father to feel a shred of affection for him, but Dustin still wants his father to love him. Look at his face in that first panel: he knows that he’s figured out how to get his father to talk shit about some imaginary stupid young people who exist in his mind, rather than about his actual son, to his son’s face.

Hi and Lois, 7/29/24

The LIBERAL COMMUNISTS at PBS want you to spend your 6 o’clock hour like Hi in panel two: getting Ludovico techniqued from watching 60 uninterrupted minutes of war crimes. But your patriotic friends at the commercial networks know what you really want: 41 minutes of actionable News You Can Use and 19 minutes of ads for new breakthrough pharmaceutical products to ask your doctor about, which are also a kind of news you can use, if you think about it!

Family Circus, 7/29/24

Ha ha, YES Jeffy, you’ve got him dead to rights for unpatriotic thoughtcrime, time to have him sent to the reeducation camps and you’re FREE

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Dennis the Menace, 7/23/24

I’m on the record as saying that “Ha ha, Dennis’s mom can’t cook” is one of my least favorite Dennis the Menace running bits, but honestly this is a pretty good take on it. The fact that Dennis is drooling is what makes it for me, like he’s just completely lost control of himself because he’s experiencing taste pleasures beyond anything he imagined possible. He’s not, of course, but leaning into the bit just makes the performative cruelty extra menacing.

Hi and Lois, 7/23/24

I love how everyone is pleased with this arrangement except for Chip, who looks gobsmacked. He’s a romantic, kind of! Maybe he’d like to see the tender performances from [INSERT THE EXTREMELY ON-THE-NOSE NAMES OF UP-AND-COMING YOUNG ACTORS IN THE WALKER-BROWNEIVERSE HERE, LIKE, I DUNNO, “HUNK HANDSOME” AND “PRISCILLA PRETTY”] in Love Saga instead of the violent, puerile CGI slop of Missile Extreme, you ever think about that???

Blondie, 7/23/24

“Food-FOMO”? The actual abbreviation is clearly the much funnier “FOMOOF,” you clod, not that I expect anything better from a journalistic outfit that thinks a question mark with a hamburger as the little dot is somehow an appropriate graphic for this non-story. You make me sick.