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Archive: Hi and Lois

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I wanna see Rex do gangster slang (he will absolutely refuse to do gangster slang)

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/17/21

“Butch Belluso” is of course, Rene Belluso, who once upon a time was Sarah’s art teacher, hired by the mob queenpin who had taken Sarah under her wing and also employed Rene for a little light art forgery. Since he parted company from his erstwhile employers, he’s engaged in a number of scams, like comics fraud and new age flim-flammery and even a little light COVID grifting, so he’s definitely a guy not into “the law” or whatever, but he’s never exactly struck me as the type who’d kidnap anyone, or go out in a blaze of glory in a shootout with the cops, no matter what literary genre he’s situated in. Then again, this is Sarah’s fantasy, so maybe despite her amnesia her subconscious remembers that he once got to order her around, and now she wants him dead from multiple gunshots to the face.

Hi and Lois, 3/17/21

As a fan of Thirsty sticking to his canonical role as this strip’s alcoholic, I’m not troubled by his declaration that he’s “on the wagon” today: his rumpled appearance and his immediate substitution of another chemical fix for his troubles (the raw uncut sugar in Lucky Charms marshmallows) tells me that this isn’t a serious stab at recovery, but rather just another move in his roller-coaster life of hilarious drunkery.

Mary Worth, 3/17/21

Guys, there are few bigger fans of dogs and the work they do than me, but … this is a lot, right? I’m beginning to think that a dog, or maybe a top-flight content marketing agency hired by all dogs everywhere, wrote this.

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Les teaches literature, which as we all know is the art of identifying references

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Funky Winkerbean, 3/6/21

In real life, very few people are annoying on purpose, and the question of whether you think they’re annoying is a subjective one. In fiction, though, even in a world where many discount authorial intent, we can still try to puzzle out the question of whether a character is supposed to be annoying or not. Certainly as a normal human, I’ve found this lady’s endless reference getting insufferable, and have assumed that’s the intended reading of the character; but today we learned that she also got Les’s “kemo sabe” joke, a reference we’ve been told repeatedly in the strip that it’s bad not to get, actually. So is this lady good, because the best thing one can do in life is get references — specifically, whatever references Les is laying down in relation to his dead wife, Lisa? Or is it just true that all of us, reference-getters and reference-non-getters alike, are basically irritating? I fear the latter may be more true to life.

Gasoline Alley, 3/6/21

Today’s Gasoline Alley, meanwhile, has a simpler and more fundamentally joyful message: these two are gonna do iiiiiiiitttttt

Hi and Lois, 3/6/21

Hey, were you interested in maybe seeing the dress that’s at the center of the joke in this comic strip, since comic strips are a visual medium? Well, tough: this is the last daily strip of the week to get through, and all that golf is frankly not going to play itself.

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Love is … not really in the air, frankly, sorry to be the bearer of bad news

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Hi and Lois, 2/14/21

Longtime readers of this blog know I’m a big fan of Hi and Lois taking “Thirsty” Thurston back to his roots as a desperate alcoholic, and having the Thurstons’ marriage (strife-filled, loveless) serve as a foil to the Flagstons’ (basically fine, I guess, as near as anyone can tell), which is the theme of today’s special Valentine’s Day strip. The main thing here of interest is that Irma just calls her husband “Thurston”; it kind of works for a wife to sarcastically call her husband who she’s mad at by his last name, but I suspect that some toiler at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC realized they didn’t actually know Thirsty’s real first name, couldn’t find any answers on the strip’s official King Features page or in its Wikipedia article, and found the pressure of adding a canonical element to the strip’s lore too much, so they just punted.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/14/21

Say, what if Snuffy had been dealt a hand full of hearts? That certainly would’ve been a good trigger for remembering it was Valentine’s Day, plus he might have to briefly struggle between demonstrating affection to his wife and winning a hand with a flush! I don’t really have a joke here, I’m just workshopping ways to make this strip better.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 2/14/21

Frankly, I want to know a lot less about Harry Ape’s bank-robbing activities and a lot more about his career as an Instagram influencer — or should I say apefluencer?