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Hi and Lois, 4/19/26

I get that “cartoon dad must escape from his nagging family” is a time-honored trope, but I think the specific gripes of the Flagston clan are just way too dark for the way he nopes out of there to be comical. Lois is at the end of her rope, spending all day showing beautiful homes to her clients and then coming home to a collapsing hovel; Chip has suffered some otherwise undocumented heartbreak and is still devastated; the twins, who should be each other’s best friends within the family, have become implacable nemeses; and Trixie, like all addicts, can no longer get satisfaction from the sun as it is and demands a hotter and brighter star no matter what destructive effects that might have on our planet’s ecosystem. Based on Hi’s huge grin and rosy cheeks in the final panel, I assume that he’s “getting what he needs” thanks in part to a bottle of bourbon he keeps stashed in the glove compartment.

Blondie, 4/19/26

Look, I’m not a pickleball guy, but … the whole point of pickleball is that it’s basically ping pong scaled up to be played on a tennis court, right? Like … why aren’t the DithersCo layabouts just playing ping pong. They already have a ping pong table in the breakroom, I guarantee they have the paddles and balls somewhere. And if Dithers allows the ping pong table in the breakroom, why is he so mad about people using it? I enjoy the little illustration he made, which may be part of a whole wider collection of plausibly deniable Dagwood furry art, but I still think he’s in the wrong here.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 4/19/26

You know the whole thing in vampire lore where if you throw rice in front of a vampire, they have to stop chasing you to count the grains? Well, apparently this deli-owning dog thinks if you give Slylock a math word problem to solve, he’ll turn his ratiocination to figuring it out and won’t notice that you’ve enslaved and dismembered your fellow sapient animals to stock your shop. It didn’t work, though, and he’s going to jail, along with all of his customers.

Beetle Bailey, 4/19/26

Oh, Beetle, you’ve really done it this time! You remembered the Sabbath day, but you forgot to keep it holy! Can’t even imagine how much KP you’ll be doing for this, in hell.

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Mary Worth, 3/23/26

One of my favorite books of the last 10 years is Because Internet, which focuses on how the internet has changed language use but has a lot to say about online culture in general. An insight from the book that I think about a lot is that there are identifiable “generations” of internet users that are determined by when people first got online and don’t necessarily map onto people’s calendar ages. A lot of Gen Xers and elder Millennials first got online in college in the 1990s, for instance, while their boomer parents might not have gained extensive experience with the internet for another 10 or 15 years.

One of the biggest internet generational divides in my opinion is whether you consider the computer or the phone to be your primary device, and one way I think it shows up is how you prefer to make large payments. Speaking as a fiftysomething, I’m fine with using Venmo to split a restaurant bill, but am constantly amazed and a little discomfited by contractors who want me to use Zelle to send them four-figure sums of money — I should be sitting down in front of a real physical keyboard to do that! Now, these are mostly young people, of course, but clearly Harvey is one of those older guys who worked in some high-compensation, ascot-forward industry and was able to coast to retirement with his personal assistant taking care of all the computer stuff, only truly getting online in his dotage, with zero defenses built up. So why shouldn’t he send two hundred thousand American dollars to Trixie by tapping on the screen of his Samsung Galaxy S22 phone? After all, that’s the very device on which he met her in the first place, and the Vanguard app makes it so easy!

Dennis the Menace, 3/23/26

OK, sure, in real life we know that this is an example of the syndicate colorist just charging in with the paint fill tool without actually reading the caption, but I’d like to think that Dennis’s grandpa is sitting there watching some revisionist post-1975 Western in color and absolutely seething about it. That’s why Dennis is telling Gina this: because he knows if she makes the mistake of asking the old man what he’s watching, she’ll get an earful about how he doesn’t tune into a cowboy movie for a bunch of moral ambiguity or whatever.

Slylock Fox, 3/23/26

I know that this multispecies society of sapient animals is still finding its footing, and maybe they haven’t gotten their education system really organized yet, but the fact that Kolton Kangaroo is so ignorant of marsupial reproductive biology is frankly embarrassing. Honestly if he doesn’t understand how capable of movement his own child is, he deserves to be a victim of whatever kind of scam Shady is pulling on him here.

Beetle Bailey, 3/23/26

Here’s today’s Beetle Bailey! It’s about how the title character was having a pretty good day … until his commanding officer showed up to beat the shit out of him. Honestly a surprising number of Beetle Bailey strips are about this!

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Mary Worth, 3/8/26

Five years ago, Mary tried to broach the question of whether Estelle was being grifted rather gingerly. With Harvey, she’s being somewhat more direct, and it immediately blew up in her face, though maybe that’s just his masculine pride kicking in and driving him to comically storm out of the room. It’s just like beloved [note to self: look up what kind of job “B.C. Forbes” has held or what sort of person they are before publishing this post and insert description here] “B.C. Forbes” says: if you don’t have your life savings drained every few years or so by a Cambodian-based criminal syndicate, you were leaving legitimate opportunities to have sex with hot babes much younger than you on the table!

Shoe, 3/8/26

I know, I know this is a perennial gripe of mine, but: You absolutely cannot do whimsical jokes about birds in a comic strip where everyone is a bird. This is a joke about a number of these characters’ peers committing violent, awful suicide! It’s pretty believable that they’d do it, since all the bird-people in this strip are very depressed, and with good reason, since they live in a world dominated by sapient birds where nevertheless KFC is a viable business.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 3/8/26

Now, this strip? Where Slylock Fox, a sapient animal cop in a world dominated by sapient animals, is providing enhanced security to a wealthy and influential sapient animal who is fairly obviously wearing a fur coat? That doesn’t make me mad at all. That’s just how the world works. That’s a mystery that kids need to learn how to solve a lot more than anything about gloves and how people won’t pick up just one lying there by itself no matter how lovely it is.