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Beetle Bailey, Blondie, and Shoe, 9/4/24

Look, we’d all like to believe that works of art spring from the pure, isolated genius of their creator’s mind, but when you’re talking about a commercial and ongoing project like a daily comic strip, obviously the whole thing ends up being affected by the desires and needs of your audience. You gotta give ’em what they want! The creators of legacy strips are acutely aware that the “’em” in this case is “old people” and what they want is news they can use, like “Ha ha, there sure are a bunch of crazy ‘social media’ sites these days,” “Hey, did you know that you can make money on playing video games? Maybe that grandson of yours isn’t such a screwup after all,” and “Tired of pissing yourself? Well, here’s some unexpected good news!”

Six Chix, 9/4/24

This blog is itself a work of art in dialogue with its audience (literally, given the comment section), and apparently what you want is my funny, erudite, and occasionally lengthy riffs on the strips, which I’m happy to deliver! But it is my blog, after all, and sometimes what I want out of it is to just post a strip I read today and say “I don’t like this”, so here you go. Today’s Six Chix: I don’t like this!

Dennis the Menace, 9/4/24

Many years ago, an ex of mine had to go to traffic school to get points from a moving violation taken off her license. At the time, there were various kinds of theme schools you could go to, and she signed up for something that billed itself as “comedy driving school.” After her class, I asked her how it went, and she said, absolutely steaming mad, that “Someone needs to tell that guy that there’s a difference between being funny and being in a really good mood,” a formulation I think about all the time. Anyway, someone needs to tell the Dennis the Menace team that there’s a difference between being a menace and wasting everyone’s time because you’re one of the dumbest people alive and have no filter or sense of embarrassment about it!

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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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Gil Thorp, 7/12/24

The beloved Gil Thorp bonfire tradition has been cancelled forever due to a nationwide wood shortage, which means we must console ourselves with a somewhat more recent and less beloved tradition, the Coach of the Year awards banquet (or “COTY,” as insiders call it). Two years ago Gil won it, and last year he won it again. This year the “most improved” award has gone to Gil’s former nemesis/current assistant, so all signs point to our hero taking the COTY home for a third year in a row. I think it’s nice that they’re letting him give it to himself this year.

Gasoline Alley, 7/12/24

I forgot to mention, there’s a new cute cat in Gasoline Alley that Gertie found and brought to Walt! You can see he’s already getting adjusted to his role in this strip (coquetteishly mugging to the reader as the human characters make extremely uninteristing wordplay at one another).

Marvin, 7/12/24

Sorry my intrusive thoughts about toilets yesterday got me distracted from the important thing here, which is that Marvin is doing a very depressing series of strips where dogs talk about all the things they’ve done wrong in their lives and can’t stop thinking about.

Shoe, 7/12/24

Do birds eat cicadas? Well, according to a post called “Circada Bird Feast Protocol” on the friendtocicadas dot org blog, which seems like an extremely reputable source, yes! So, sadly, this conversation is actually about how this boring little town will soon be beset by famine.