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Pajama Diaries, 4/26/19

I’ve got a solid five months of reading the Pajama Diaries under my belt, and I feel comfortable in saying that I pretty much know what its lane is, and that lane is “anxiety-ridden parents of teens try to enjoy life but can’t, really, because of anxiety.” Their lane is not “middle aged suburban lowkey kinksters.” That lane is occupied by Arlo and Janis. Sorry, Pajama Diaries, I’m going to have to request that you stay in your lane.

(Also, the strip’s Wikipedia page claims that it takes place in Ohio, so I’m going to assume that “safety word” is a regional variation for “safe word,” like how my cousins in Columbus thought “sneakers” was the dumbest word they ever heard but said “tennies” like it was totally normal.)

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/26/19

I like Sarah’s pensive look in the first panel here. She seems to be thinking, “Wait, I know I have amnesia, but I have this feeling that I’m the one who’s supposed to be getting free stuff from some person of inexplicable means. This doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel right at all.”

Hagar the Horrible, 4/26/19

Ha ha, it’s funny because Lucky Eddie’s uncle was injured, leaving hin unable to continue the violent means by which he gained sustenance in his medieval environment. Probably he’s going to die in poverty, and soon!

Beetle Bailey, 4/26/19

Ha ha, it’s funny because Beetle got mauled by a bunch of raccoons! There’s a good chance he has rabies now?

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/24/19

Hey, occasional Rex Morgan readers! Remember Edward, the cruel bully who pulled an “Emperor’s New Clothes” on Sarah’s art, but then Sarah raised up a rebellion against him, and then later Sarah got amnesia and then Edward became nice and protected Sarah, after she had to go to a public school? Well, I guess we’re back to another story about how bullying is bad, and also how the only thing that can stop a bad bully is a good bully, a good, huge bully who can just beat the ever-loving crap out of the bad bully, for justice.

Hi and Lois, 4/24/19

Gotta love how depressed Hi looks in this strip! At first you might think that it’s because Trixie doesn’t appreciate all the hard work he’s done to clean the windows and just foolishly attributes the stronger light coming into the house to “sun vitamins.” But of course, in-universe, the other Flagstons can’t “hear” or otherwise perceive the dialogue in Trixie’s thought balloons, because otherwise they’d know that they have a baby capable of fully adult cognition and they’d probably be much more freaked out. No, Hi is just depressed because chores suck and he doesn’t want to do them.

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Dick Tracy, 4/22/19

A quirk of the newspaper industry is that, traditionally, many people have subscribed only to the Sunday paper, which was much larger than the other days’ editions, and, conversely, some people subscribed to every day but Sunday. You can see the effect of this in how the continuity strips deal with Sundays. Most structure things so that Sunday sums up the previous week’s action, accommodating both Sunday-only and no-Sunday audiences while boring the rest of us. The Phantom famously has an entirely separate storyline that runs on Sundays; Gil Thorp doesn’t bother running on Sundays at all.

Then there’s Dick Tracy, which treats Sunday as just another day of the week, man. This is hilarious to me this week because I’m imagining how anyone who didn’t see yesterday’s shootout would parse this conversation, which sounds to me a lot like Dick and Joe acknowledging, without coming right out and saying, that Tracy killed an unarmed man and then planted a gun on him.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/22/19

I immediately and 100% believe that not only did Rex tell Sarah that ice cream trucks are “music trucks,” but that he also told her that they were the only legal way to listen to music of any sort. It’s great, how the music trucks will drive from neighborhood to neighborhood, bringing their songs with them! The rest of the time we get to enjoy a little peace and quiet around here.