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Hi and Lois, 11/30/20

The full range of generational reactions on display here really makes this comic for me. Chip is, as one expects, contemptuous; Lois is pleased to have a nice “conversation piece” for the living room and Hi is more bemused anything elese. But Dot and Ditto are fucking gobsmacked by the existence of this encyclopedia, on some very fundamental level. They’re like “Books? On paper? We heard about these things, but we’ve never seen them before. And now there are a bunch of them, right here in the house. Holy shit. Holy shit.”

Mary Worth, 11/30/20

Sorry Tommy: what Brandy needs to talk about it that she’s about to start a union organizing drive at Freda’s and the last thing she needs to deal with are any kiss-asses amongst the workers. Looks like you picked the wrong time to try to impress your boss!

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Hi and Lois, 11/22/20

Hey, I get where Hi is coming from here! All of these strips have their gimmicks: wacky relatable Vikings, a sassy cat, children let loose in a world without any apparent adult intervention. Even Blondie and Family Circus, which are both more grounded “family” strips, feature heightened, exaggerated characters, each with their own set of recognizable tics. But Hi, and Hi’s world? Well, he’s just a regular middle-class guy living with regular people in regular American suburbia. There are no strict limits on his behavior but no simple prompts to action either — in other words, he can do pretty much anything, but has to choose on his own to do it, which is terrifying. In that sense, his dilemma is the most relatable on the comics page.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/22/20

Sorry, did that get a little Too Real? Well, here are some unlikeable Funky Winkerbean characters (BUT I REPEAT MYSELF! [rimshot]) making puns at each other. The throwaway panels at the top are actually crucial to today’s strip: without them, it looks like Harry is the only one doing irritating wordplay, but when we see the full picture we understand that we’re witnessing interlocked acts of mutual ongoing passive aggression.

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Hi and Lois, 11/15/20

From the fall of 1992 to the spring of 1993, I was a freshman at Cornell University, and at Cornell — and, I assume, at many other universities, although I can only speak to my experience — Spin Doctors’ debut album, Pocket Full of Kryptonite, was absolutely inescapable, and after a few weeks I definitely wanted to escape it, though I admit that during the brief window before I came to loathe the band I did put “Two Princes” on a mix tape for a young lady I was trying, without success, to woo. Anyway, I had mostly managed to purge the music from my head until someone over at Waker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC decided to slip the phrase “pocket full of Kryptonite” into today’s strip, which made me wonder if the album title was maybe a reference to something else, but nope, it’s just a lyric from the album, so there you go: Spin Doctors content in today’s Hi and Lois. While on this journey of discovery, I did learn that that Spin Doctors’ Wikipedia article has one of my very favorite Wikipedia Things, a bar chart showing the comings and goings of various musicians in the band’s lineup over the years, from which I learned that John Popper, later of Blues Traveler, another band unavoidable in Cornell dorms in the early-to-mid ’90s, was briefly in Spin Doctors, which I found noteworthy enough to mention to my wife. Her responses were “Am I supposed to care about this” and “I cannot think of two bands I care less about,” which, I guess, is ultimately why I have a blog, because I have to tell someone this stuff. Anyway, thanks a lot for making me think about this, Hi and Lois. Thanks a lot.

Six Chix, 11/15/20

Honestly, I’m not even sure what to say about this except that I’m kind of in awe of the series of free associations that brought this … allegory? metaphor? fever dream? … into existence. I assume that after utterly defeating the dinosaurs on the court, the asteroids high fived one another, leapt far up into space, and then plummeted back down to earth, obliterating both their vanquished foes and themselves in an apocalyptic blast.

Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/15/20

Ha ha, Parson, that so-called “currency” doesn’t do you much good in a community that mostly exists as a pre-monetary economy in which social ties mediate almost all economic exchange, does it?