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Family Circus, 6/24/24

I think it’s a not uncommon phenomenon to have one grandmother who, while still loving, is just less on your wavelength than the other one. Like, there’ll be one grandma who’s happy to really get into your shenanigans, and another one whose vibe is more like Grandma Keane here, who is clearly thinking “Oh, was his father this stupid when he was this age? I don’t think he was.”

Gil Thorp, 6/24/24

There are two different kinds of newly partnered up divorced guys: the ones who treat their new relationship as an opportunity to completely remake their life, and get frosted tips and make embarrassing decisions about vehicle purchases; and the ones who simply slot their new partner, hopefully willingly, into the comfortable paired up life they’ve experienced for decades. Anyway, Beth, Gil’s new bartendress lover, seems happy enough to deploy her professional skills in service of the the Thorpian summer tradition of sitting on the lawn and enjoying an icy cold beverage, and hopefully will be equally amenable to other summer traditions, like plotlines on the wackiness level of “juvenile delinquents forced to battle one another for the entertainment of their sadistic warden and an audience of streaming viewers.”

Marvin, 6/24/24

You probably think that being the “comics curmudgeon” is some kind of dream come true. But did you know that sometimes it involves staring at a Marvin panel and seeing purple liquid coming out of Marvin’s diaper, maybe, and trying to figure out if you’re misreading that or if the intended reading is that he’s leaking poop or piss and the colorist is making a desperate attempt to protect us from that knowledge. Also, why are they punishing him? Is this considered a good potty training technique, to punish kids for accidents? I’ve never bought into Freudian theory, but maybe there’s something to it if this is common. On the other hand, I do think Marvin in general needs to be punished more. Being the comics curmudgeon is hard, is my point! I have to think about this stuff every day! For you! For you!

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Marvin, 6/23/24

Not to brag or anything, but after nearly 20 years of my doing this blog, my archives page has become a valuable historical resource that anyone can use to explore the history of newspaper comic strips in the 21st century, assuming that the strip you’re looking for was something I thought was interesting or particularly bad or that I could turn into a weird riff on whatever day it was published. I myself cannot keep all this history in my head and frequently turn to the archives for answers to questions like “Have we ever actually seen Marvin’s aunt in the strip before?” It turns out that in 2006 there was a plotline involving his aunt adopting a baby from China named “Ming Ming” whose appearance is extremely off-putting because she looks exactly like a Funko Pop, something I wasn’t able to articulate at the time because, as I discovered after a little research, Funko Pops would not be invented for another five years. I am a wizened old man and I hope that you, my faithful readers, are preparing yourselves to be mummified and entombed with me in the spectacular pyramid of comics jokes I’ve been building over the past two decades.

Wait, where was I? Oh, right, what I’m saying is that I assume the Marvin creative team long ago forgot about poor Ming Ming, just like I had, and presumably they don’t use my archives page for research because they don’t want to read all the mean things I say about their work. It’s not even clear to me that this is supposed to be the same aunt, or if we can even say that there’s a fixed set of Marvin’s relatives that have continuously existed in some sense over the past 20 years. I also don’t know if being part of the neo-rockabilly lifestyle is an established bit of lore about Marvin’s dad’s terrible coworker. I could go back into my archives to find out but, you know what? I’ve already spent enough time digging through the depths of Marvin for one day. Gotta limit my exposure, for my own good.

Shoe, 6/23/24

For reasons unclear to me, Shoe recently decided to bring back Muffy Hollandaise, the Treetops Tattler’s former intern, who stopped appearing in the strip so long ago that my archives would be of no help in learning her secrets. I say the reasons are unclear to me because they reintroduced her as an avowed enemy of her former boss and a successful journalist in an industry that is, if not thriving, then at least doing better than print media; but, despite that set-up, she’s mostly being used like every other character in the strip, which is to say she delivers cruel, wordplay-adjacent zingers. I do have to say that I enjoy the way she leans in to deliver her line here. Lets you know there’s real venom in it.

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Dustin, 6/7/24

“Dustin can’t get a date” is a running bit in Dustin that usually I hate because the strips on this theme inevitably happen with supposed zoomers Dustin and Fitch trying to pick up girls at a fern bar rather than each of them sitting alone in their darkened bedroom swiping through “the apps” with dead eyes. But in the bigger picture, I wonder exactly how deep we’re supposed to think Dustin’s romantic failure goes. Has he ever had a steady relationship? Had sex? Kissed anyone? And, of course, since Dustin is himself a fictional character, we must extend these questions to the creators of the strip itself, because it seems insane to me that in today’s strip this unfortunately young lady already has her hand resting on the crook of Dustin’ elbow. Why would you think someone who has agreed to a date minutes ago under duress would do this? Is this what they think a date is?

Marvin, 6/7/24

Hey, did you just get a promotion at work? Did you ever consider that this is basically the same thing as having to wipe piss and shit off of a plastic chair? Honestly, we talk so much about how gross Marvin is that I think we underrate the fact that it’s also very, very depressing.