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Blondie, 5/25/20

If you had asked me to make a list of Dagwood’s trademark “things,” obviously sandwiches would be at the top, but I’d also say sleepiness, being a slacker at work, insatiable hunger (if we’re thinking of that as a separate thing from the sandwiches), his constant physical abuse of the mailman, and his weird passive-aggressive relationship with his supposed “best friend” and next door neighbor. “Classic TV” wouldn’t appear anywhere on the list, and while as written for the last decade or two Dagwood has embodied powerful boomer vibes and I’d definitely believe that he’s into classic TV, all the TV jokes in this strip are about made-up shows with food themes that he’s obsessed with (see “insatiable hunger,” above). This strip, in other words, has shaken me to my very core.

Gil Thorp, 5/25/20

“If you hadn’t imposed a life-altering punishment on a student for an extremely minor infraction, you could’ve been fired and reduced to penury yourself! Remember, in this totalitarian panopticon, we are simultaneously the enforcers of arbitrary rules and subject to them. It’s very grim!”

Marvin, 5/25/20

Man, it took me a lot longer than it should’ve for to realize that by “poor loser” the girl baby whose name I refuse to learn or look up means what a normal English speaker would call a “sore loser”; I thought she meant someone who was a loser because they were poor, and I actually started getting indignant on Marvin’s behalf. He’s not poor at all! Have you seen his bathroom? It’s a fucking palace!

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Dustin, 5/17/20

Hello, fellow young people! Remember ringtones? Remember assigning specific ringtones to your friends? Remember talking on the phone? Remember when friends who were your age had both landlines and cell phones? TRICK QUESTIONS! You don’t need to “remember” any of these things, because they’re a part of your everyday life, here in the year 2020! After all, Dustin is a strip whose whole point is that it has its finger on the pulse of how young people behave, and it wouldn’t mislead us, would it?

Marvin, 5/17/20

A lot of people probably have a certain amount of contempt for the army of overeager intellectual property and trademark lawyers employed by Disney, but hear me out: if they keep the Marvin creative team in a state of panic that they’ll be sued if they even think the phrase “baby Yoda,” can they really be all that bad?

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Marvin, 5/15/20

At first I was going to comment that it seems weird that Jeff used “this room” for what’s obviously the bathroom. But then I realized how absolutely enormous that bathroom is. In their desperate attempt to somehow get Marvin to start pooping in the toilet, have they tried to “normalize” bathroom activities so that instead of being a small room shamefully walled off from the rest of the family life, the bathroom has become the centerpiece of the home; they’ve knocked down so many walls that most of everyday living now takes place in the vast open space they now refer to, generically, as “this room.” Definitely the saddest part is that it hasn’t worked, although a close second in sadness is the fact that it’s apparently pretty disgusting.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/15/20

Finally! Truck’s problems are about to be solved by …. e-commerce! You guys heard about this “internet” thing? You guys heard you can sell things on it now? Truly crazy, folks, truly crazy.