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Tina’s Groove, 8/1/24

I’m honestly really starting to enjoy the 15-years-ago-ness of the Tina’s Groove strips offered up daily by the King Features website; for me, that lands in a nostalgic sweet spot that feels much more dated than Crock reruns from the ’90s or whatever. Like, remember the ’00s, when the only thing that could send a text message was a BlackBerry, and if you wanted to send such a message, you would ask your companion politely first? Of course you don’t, because that’s not really how it worked, but I suppose it might be how someone who’d never actually interacted with a BlackBerry user might think it worked.

Anyway, this strip obviously has a more timeless element to it, which is that Tina seems to have gone on a date (?) with a guy who she thought was Amish, but isn’t really. A good clue would’ve been his facial hair: mustaches were so strongly associated with soliders and militarism in early modern Germany that the pacifist Anabaptist sects that were the forerunners to today’s Amish and Mennonites foreswore them, leading to the distinctive chinbeard we associate with them today. Another way she could’ve guessed he wasn’t Amish is that he’s on date with her right now, since that’s pretty antithetical to their whole deal.

Mary Worth, 8/1/24

Don’t forget, Dr. Ed is an accomplished amateur pianist! I myself briefly forgot, and thought that maybe Estelle was doing an outwardly worshipful “Oh!” but an inwardly exasperated “Sigh!” because she actually was sick of his musical stylings, but no, that’s a worshipful “Sigh!” and her inner and outer selves are fully in alignment, which obviously makes for exciting conflict-free storytelling.

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Mary Worth, 7/30/24

A recurring question that arises in the increasingly Wilbur-focused era of Mary Worth we find ourselves in is: are we getting so much Wilbur because we’re expected to like and support him, or are we being repeatedly shown his worst humiliations, in order to create a strip that is nothing more than his personal hell? I’ve had my doubts, but today’s strip, in which Wilbur tells an incredulous fish that he communicated with another dead fish in a dream, and then we smash cut to Wilbur’s ex, whom Wilbur named the dead fish after, in the midst of an extremely erotic canoodle with her handsome boyfriend, certainly seems to point in one direction fairly strongly.

Blondie, 7/30/24

Blondie absolutely loves a “what’s a universal, non-controversial cultural touchstone of the moment we can do extremely lazy jokes about,” and obviously the Olympics are the pinnacle of that sort of thing, with the added advantage that they last for weeks. Yesterday we had a mildly funny joke about Dagwood getting in trouble for streaming the Olympics on his phone during a work meeting, but I’m actually kind of appalled by today’s strip, which seems to imply that Olympic runners have their performance scored by judges rather than simply being timed to see who finishes the event the fastest.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/30/24

I love it when a work of art sparks a conversation, raising not one but multiple questions about its characters and its world. For instance, today’s Snuffy Smith has me asking “Doesn’t ‘busking’ usually happen on a sidewalk in a big city? Why is Jughaid doing it out in the middle of an open field somewhere” but also “Doesn’t Jughaid wear that stupid hat all the time? Does Ol’ Bullet repeatedly attack him when he does, and if so why don’t we get to see it more often?”

Shoe, 7/30/24

Ha ha! A laugh track, get it? Because his political promises are laughable! Good one! Say, does anyone involved in the creation of Shoe know what a “website” is and how one works? Like have they ever used the internet, at all?

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Mary Worth, 7/28/24

Real talk: my initial thought reading the throwaway panels was “Ha ha, Wilbur wet the bed!” But no, actually, he finally achieved emotional closure about his dead fish because he had a dream where the fish called him (or his fishy dream avatar) “dad” and swam away with his friends into the fish afterlife, and then he woke up crying, which is substantially less dignified than wetting the bed.

Dennis the Menace, 7/28/24

You ever wonder what Henry and Alice talk about when they have the house to themselves, presumably because Dennis is next door making Mr. Wilson’s life miserable? Well, apparently they reflect on past Dennis menacing incidents, including ones so traumatizing that just the memory of them makes Alice feel a need to go lie down, so I have to admit my respect for his menacing game just went up exponentially.

Blondie, 7/28/24

If I walked into my barbershop and found a barber lounging casually in the chair, and he looked me right in the eye and said “Showtime!”, I would assume that I would soon be on the floor bleeding out from numerous wounds inflicted by a straight razor. Dagwood absolutely should be thankful that all he endured was some sub-par conversation!