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Blondie, 11/25/24

A common development in all sorts of open-ended narratives (comic strips, TV shows, what have you) is that ancillary characters are introduced to fill a specific purpose, like being the main character’s barber, but then you have a lot of strips/episodes to fill, and sometimes you use them to flesh out the backstories of those ancillary characters, and sometimes that process (when done well) reveals that these characters have full, rich lives beyond the specific purpose they were originally created for, but other times that process (when done poorly) simply tells you that the barber’s off-panel life consists of more barber, endless barber, barber all the way down, barber (as revealed today) that stretches back in time across generations. The one non-barber aspect that peeks through is Italianness, which is why our guy is allowed, as a member of that fiery and emotional race, to shed a single tear in panel two.

Mary Worth, 11/25/24

Haha, yes, it begins, and by “it” I mean Mary’s friends bailing on her now that she’s too sick to put a piping hot turkey dinner in front of their face on Thursday. A normal person would hear “I’m too tired to even make my homemade chicken soup for myself!” and ask “Oh, Mary, what can I do to step up and help,” but instead Toby is all “Don’t worry, I forgive you! You just lie there on the couch in your own sick while I use this adorable tiny easel I bought on Etsy to paint a cat with fetal alcohol syndrome that I hope someone will buy on Etsy ironically.”

Gil Thorp, 11/25/24

Big news! With Gil steadfastly refusing to return to work and the Mudlarks doing even worse than usual in his absence, Coach Hernandez is consulting … a pipe-smoking ghost??? Who doesn’t really seem to have any specific football knowledge? More on this important story as it develops.

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Mary Worth, 11/23/24

Big news everyone. Huge news. Incredible news. Mary is coming down with COVID or the flu or maybe just a bad cold, who’s to say, but the point is that she’s probably going to be too sick to do even the half-assed job of cooking Thanksgiving dinner that she promised to her friends some people she knows from her apartment building. Now, the heartwarming outcome will probably that the gang will come together to do Thanksgiving themselves the best they can and gather ’round her sickbed with their improvised feast, showing Mary how much she’s loved and appreciated, but let’s get real: these are the Westons and the Camerons we’re talking about, and Wilbur and Ian will absolutely be fist-fighting at PriceCo over the last frozen turkey, destroying said turkey and an entire endcap of cans of pumpkin pie filling in the process, while Mary lies on the couch at home, coughing up blood, forgotten and untended.

Hagar the Horrible, 11/23/24

Every time we’re reminded that Hagar’s son is named “Hamlet” I am tickled anew by the thought of Hagar being the analogue of the Ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Still, the plot mechanics don’t really work — Hagar doesn’t have a brother that we know of, and as today’s strip reminds us, the intrafamilial threats he faces lie elsewhere — and frankly neither do the personalities. Hagar is a pretty happy-go-lucky guy, all things considered! Can you imagine him brooding around a castle, hounding his descendents with demands for vengeance? He’d probably just chalk up his death to “one of those things” and move onto Valhalla to see what exactly is going on there.

Flash Gordon, 11/23/24

As much as I love Flash Gordon’s current incarnation, I acknowledge that you’re never going to get a new incarnation of Flash Gordon if the people behind it aren’t a little more fascinated with old timey comics lore than is normal and healthy. This can spin terribly out of hand (see for instance basically every third Dick Tracy strip) but little bits of lore dispensed like easter eggs is all in good fun. For instance, did you know that Flash Gordon, canonically, went to Yale? That’s right. Flash Gordon, two-fisted spaceman, is an Ivy Leaguer — specifically, a Yale man. Depending on your personal prejudices, feel free to imagine that he had an Earthbound life as an irritating comp lit Marxist academic wannabe failson or a coke-addled finance bro failson before he had the good fortune to end up in space!

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Gasoline Alley, 11/22/24

Oh, sorry kids, looks like you’re going to slowly suffocate to death as your spaceship goes dark and circles Mars in an erratic orbit that will take centuries to decay. You know, you could’ve avoided all this if you had taken Ida Knoe the evil talking doll up on her offer to show you the solar system. Your voyage with her would’ve been made possible by demonic power from the depths of Hell itself, which unlike “electricity” or whatever isn’t subject to various physical laws and limitations that could leave you in a situation like this. Hindsight, though, am I right?

Pluggers, 11/22/24

As a coastal elitist, I guess I’m not really conversant on plugger standards of masculinity, but before today I would’ve assumed that “you’re so feeble you need household tools to open a simple carton of milk” would be the sort of thing they’d use to make fun of me, not something they’d proudly declare, in the newspaper in front of God and everyone, to be something that defined their pluggerdom.

Dick Tracy, 11/22/24

“Kid, you don’t get it. Tracy’s already gotten rid of the regular crime! Now he’s going after building code violations! And he’s going after them with his gun!”

Mary Worth, 11/22/24

Happy Friday, everyone! Hope you were looking for a panel of Mary and Jeff passionately closed-mouthed kissing to start your weekend off right! Wait, what’s that? You weren’t? You actually find it extremely off-putting? Well, tough shit. I have to look at this stuff and now so do you.