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Blondie, 3/6/24

Personally, I think the best way to celebrate National Dentists’ Day would be to simply to go to the dentist for your twice annual cleaning! Which Dagwood has already done, so he’s way ahead of the game. And maybe you should take some time to congratulate them on their special day, but that would require knowing about it in advance, and sadly that ship has sailed for Dagwood already. Apparently he doesn’t have the calendar with all the obscure/fake holidays in it like the Blondie creative team has!

Mark Trail, 3/6/24

A lot of people complain about new-look Mark Trail, and while I’ve been accepting of certain changes, like the stubble, I absolutely cannot abide newly millennial Mark trying to tell us honest, hard-working real Americans we shouldn’t eat horses! Horsemeat made America what it is today, and the fact that the “woke mob” has come for the delicious, juicy horseburgers we all enjoy grilling up before the Big Game is a sad commentary on society.

Mary Worth, 3/6/24

Look, Mary, you have got to stop talking about Keith Hillend. Nobody cares! The only interesting thing about him is the fact that he lied about being Sonia’s dad, and you’re not privy to that information so it’s not like you can dish out the hot goss. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but have you considered asking Jeff about how his day is going or something like that?

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Mary Worth, 3/4/24

Oh, so, uh, it seems like the Keith-Kitty-Sonia family fraud reunion plot has … ended? With Keith’s tiny mind unburdened by his terrible deception? No opportunity for follow-up, though, because it’s time for Mary and Jeff’s one-a-quarter date! Yes, nothing will get Mary’s mind off the Crazy World that she learns about entirely through The News better than a desultory sexual encounter on a reasonably successful doctor’s boat.

Pluggers, 3/4/24

Shoutout to Pluggers, whose whole vibe over the decades has carefully created the strategic ambiguity that leaves me, a liberal big-city elitist, unsure whether today’s panel is about some “Hints from Heloise” type technique for keeping your shirts fresh/unwrinkled before a big event, or if it’s just a “Ha ha, pluggers are old and increasingly plagued by dementia” joke.

The Phantom, 3/4/24

The thing about the Phantom is that he’s a tough, gun-toting, fists-flying superhero vigilante but also the product of a 21-generation long eugenics program, and I feel like being raised to know this is true about yourself must have some pretty weird effects on your psyche. Like, check out how aroused Kit Jr. looks in the second panel here! “Seems that mom’s finally figured out the perfect breeding partner for me? And she’s planning to ambush me with her, sexually? Hot stuff!”

Shoe, 3/4/24

It honestly never occurred to me before this strip, but among his many other terrible qualities, Shoe is definitely a serial workplace sexual harasser.

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Curtis, 3/1/24

The weird thing about arrested-in-time strips like Curtis is that we, who have been reading this strip for decades, have internalized the rhythms of the family dynamics and recognize today’s episode as one of an infinite number of subtle variations of the “Curtis asks his dad for money” gag. But Curtis, in theory, is only 11 for a year or so, and in a strange way he’s experienced much less of his own life than we have, and so can’t predict what’ll happen next. Look at his smile in panel two! “Throw his money out a window?” he’s thinking. “What a charmingly odd idea! Not sure where he’s going with this but I’m sure I’ll have some cash in my pocket by the end of it.” Anyway, Curtis, have you considered getting a Spotify subscription? They have Six-ribs’ whole catalog, along with a huge number of other hip-hop artists, and 60 bucks could get you six months!

Marvin, 3/1/24

It took me a minute to figure out, but I think the joke here is supposed to be “The dog, who should not be eating people food, will end up eating the meatloaf, because someone will be surreptitiously feeding it to him, ha ha!” But this is a strip where dogs and babies have adult human-level cognition, so don’t they shouldn’t act like we’re supposed to be surprised or amused that they might eat adult human food. Anyway, my initial read on this was that the joke was about the dog not wanting to fill the house with horrible odors vented from his bowels, which would at least be kind of a twist for this strip.

Mary Worth, 3/1/24

Toby is truly one of my favorite ancillary Mary Worth character. Unlike Wilbur, she’s used sparingly enough so that it’s a true delight when she occasionally shows up and says things like “I want to take up cooking, which my husband would love, but my neighbor up the hall, who rarely cooks for us, is so much better than me at it, so why bother?” This would be hilarious even if the thing the lady up the hall had just dished out wasn’t the most disgusting brown glop you could possibly imagine. Anyway, Mary is being either incredibly kind or incredibly sarcastic when she calls Toby “a talented artist and a great friend,” because she definitely isn’t the former and I’d be willing to bet quite a bit that she’s isn’t the latter either.