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Blondie, 8/28/17

I genuinely enjoyed today’s Blondie because it does a little switcheroo by playing on a couple different things we know about Dagwood. Like, we know Dagwood is bad at his job. Really bad! I feel like we don’t dwell on this enough. I know Mr. Dithers is supposed to be an impossible-to-please tyrant, but everything we see about Dagwood’s work life — the napping at his desk, the way he’s always surfing food porn during business hours, the offhand references to all the presentations he screws up — points to him being genuinely incompetent. Which is kind of interesting, considering he’s the protagonist of the strip! Anyway, it’s in character, and actually funny, to get two panels of mounting panic email because he completely failed to wrap up everything he was supposed to take care of before he left on vacation.

But then, in panel three, we abruptly shift gears, and realize those emails are about something else we know about Dagwood: that he is a limitless appetite, a nightmarish spatial anomaly who can take any amount of foodstuff down his infinite gullet. Just imagine Lou at the diner, the sloshing sea of subpar chili reaching his chin. “Who usually ate all this,” he asks, baffled. “Where is it coming from? Where does it usually go?” He can hardly breathe from the smell. “Where’s Dagwood? Why didn’t Dagwood tell us he was leaving? Why didn’t we make plans?”

Mary Worth, 8/28/17

“Poor Dawn! She’ll be devastated! This will work out great for me, a guy who definitely wants to sleep with her but doesn’t have much to offer beyond being ‘nicer’ than an actual adulterer!”

Slylock Fox, 8/28/17

Having eliminated all crime in the new animal-ruled world, Slylock is keeping himself entertained by just pointing out when his least favorite animals do things incorrectly.

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Mark Trail, 8/25/17

It appears that the time for trick riding is done. It has its place, of course, like when you need to trick a particularly dim kidnapper who can’t be bothered to look down a cliff to see if you’re dead at the bottom of it, or if it’s really a cliff at all and not just a gentle slope. But now it’s the draft horses’ time to shine. They’re calm, and they’re strong. That’s the attitude you want a horse to have when you send it to fight a bear in a cave. Horse vs. bear, deep beneath the earth’s crust: the greatest spectacle nature has to offer. I for one am ready.

Mary Worth, 8/25/17

As predicted, Dr. Ned has been off smooching with Dawn (and presumably every other comely young temp in the hospital) despite the fact that he’s still married, to his wife, from whom he earlier claimed to be divorced! And now Jared is about to stumble upon this shocking fact, which there was really no reason for Dr. Ned to ever lie to him about, but whatever. Will Jared able to warn Dawn in time???? He might have an easier time convincing her of his good intentions, if he weren’t such an off-putting dweeb who’s been blatantly trying to get in her pants since day one!

Marvin, 8/25/17

You know, I get the conceit of Marvin. I really do! I get that it’s funny to imagine that preverbal infants and toddlers might have fully formed adult thoughts and personalities inside their little heads, and that it’s funny to extrapolate how adult thought processes would map on to a baby’s everyday concerns. You follow that train of logic and then, sure, you get to a point where you realize you could get a laugh out of someone using grown-up language to complain that his parents don’t want him to shit himself anymore! Then you do that joke at least once a week for 35 years.

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Mary Worth, 8/24/17

When I was a little kid, I read Peanuts anthologies obsessively, which is a great way to learn about melancholy. Peanuts characters notoriously sigh audibly all the time, and like lots of children acquiring language competency, I quickly came to understand how sighs were supposed to be deployed, even if I didn’t get that the word “sigh” in these word balloons was supposed to signify the nonverbal sound we call a sigh and not the actual word “sigh.” The upshot is that I would say the word “sigh” as a kid when it was appropriate to sigh, and no adult told me not to do this for years, presumably because it was hilarious.

Anyway, this is a long way to say that I love Mary Worth’s tendency to put nonverbal signifiers, like “groan!” and “sheesh.” and, today, “sigh!”, in thought balloons. Can you really think a paralinguistic utterance like a sigh? Sure you can! Eight-year-old Josh was there to prove it!

Dennis the Menace, 8/24/17

Wait, so Henry and Alice’s entire wedding/honeymoon album is only six pages long? I can’t decide if this means that Dennis is right and Disneyland would’ve been an improvement on whatever they did, or if they spent their entire honeymoon and much of the wedding reception having vigorous marital relations, and the real menace is the fact that Dennis was simultaneously the product and the end of a pastime for which they once had great enthusiasm.