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The Lockhorns, 2/12/25

Inexpensive compared to what, Leroy? Eating at a “nice” restaurant? It still is! Eating at home? It never was! No, you’ve just decided to make Loretta feel bad because she begged to go out to eat somewhere, anywhere for once. Isn’t it cruel enough that you’re forcing her to split a single order of fries with you? Why can’t you be more like the guy in the background, who sincerely appreciates all the fast food industry’s deep bench of food scientists have done in terms of creating meal-like experiences suffused with the proper combinations of chemicals to activate the exact same part of your brain that reacts to cocaine?

Dennis the Menace, 2/12/25

Normally I’m not a fan of the “Dennis shit-talks his mom’s cooking” strips, but I gotta admit he’s really selling it here. That’s the face a guy with a mouthful of sawdust. That’s the face a guy who hasn’t tasted anything other than sawdust in years.

Pluggers, 2/12/25

Either pluggers swap sexual partners so often they can no longer be bothered to keep track of their fuckbuddies’ names, or they’re suffering from some kind of tragic brain ailment that’s causing early onset dementia. I leave it up to you to decide which possibility is more disturbing.

Mary Worth, 2/12/25

“I am now that Jared has pointed out that ‘Dirk’ rhymes with ‘jerk’! That’s a great mnemonic to remind me that he’s a jerk! Usually I just see his pretty eyes and beefy forearms and forget.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/12/25

Ha ha, it’s funny because everyone in town knows that Snuffy is a financial, legal, and emotional burden on all of his loved ones!

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Mary Worth, 2/9/25

I have not really been talking about this Mary Worth plotline much, because it turns out that seeing a big beefy asshole act in a way that’s clearly emotionally abusive towards his girlfriend and feels like it could become physically abusive at any moment isn’t “fun” or “funny” the way most of the dysfunctional antics in this strip are. However, when the big physical confrontation takes the form of a shove to Jared’s chest so feeble that even he seems surprised by it? And Dawn reacts with the supporting attack of “accidentally” dropping a bowling ball on Dirk’s foot? And then he calls her something truly gasp-worthy, probably a “Christ-abandoned trollop”? Well, even I have to admit: that’s pretty funny, and it gets even funnier when you see that poor Aeschylus, who wrote a civilization-defining trilogy about ghastly cycles of murder and revenge and divine wrath only being resolved by Athena founding institutions of human justice, has been dragged in to provide a sheen of legitimacy to the proceedings. Don’t worry, though: none of the bajillion websites that have this quote on them tell you which play it’s from, which is a good sign that it’s made up, so Aeschylus is in fact chilling in the Greek underworld and does not need to trouble himself with Dawn’s romantic trials. (Google’s Gemini AI on separate queries tried to tell me that the line is from The Remembered, which is not an actual play, and that while it’s not from a specific play it captures the themes of the Oresteia, which is pretty funny in its own right.)

Blondie, 2/9/25

There’s a lot of questions to ask here (Who are these people and why are they attending Dagwood’s Super Bowl party in lieu of any of his actual friends or acquaintances? How committed are they to the old-time football helmet bit? Is that one guy supposed to be British?) but mostly I want to criticize the final panel. This is the comics! What you depict is only limited by your imagination! Why is this set up to imply that even within the universe of the strip, one of these guys is just visualizing a military flyover, when the artist could’ve just depicted a squadron of actual fighter jets swooping low over Dagwood’s suburban neighborhood, deafening and terrifying everyone for miles around and, if we’re lucky, dropping a BLU-109/B “bunker buster” bomb on the Bumstead residence and ending our national nightmare forever?

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Pluggers, 1/26/25

It’s interesting that the caption tells us that “pluggers know when they are ready for an upgrade” when the older dog-man very clearly does not know that it’s time for him to update his hearing aids. The implication casts him outside the bounds of the plugger community, which is chilling: is the age of the Boomer pluggers ending, and the era of Gen X pluggerdom, its hour come round at last, slouching towards the Pluggers HQ P.O. Box to be born? This new generation is represented by the younger dog man here, and yeah, I know these characters all have names, but I’ve been blogging about this damn strip for 18 years and I haven’t learned them yet and I’m simply not going to. I mean, let’s be real, that plugger dog-man is in his 50s, he’s got hearing aids, he’s annoyed by his elders, he’s me. That’s me there, the younger plugger dog-man. I don’t need to know his name. Anyway, I guess they’re out here in the snow because he’s going to put the older dog-man on an ice floe and then walk away.

Dennis the Menace, 1/26/25

I actually find today’s Dennis the Menace kind of charming — not, I feel I need to be clear after writing that last paragraph, because I find it relatable, I have no “plugger”-style problem in that department, thanks. I just like two specific panels: the one where Mr. Wilson emits one of his trademark beads of sweat as he announces the lack of bran cereal, as he is all too aware of the stakes here; and the one where Mrs. Wilson leans down to whisper “it keeps him moving” to Dennis, as if he has any idea what that’s supposed to mean. He’s five years old and not very bright, Martha! You gotta actually say the word “poop” if you expect him to follow what’s going on here!

Mary Worth, 1/26/25

Look, obviously Dirk is an asshole and a creep. But what about Jared, who took up his girlfriend’s idea about doing a photoshoot and immediately turned it into an opportunity for Star Wars cosplay? Isn’t that just as bad? No, obviously not. But it’s not good.