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Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/10/25

Even as I age, I stick to one of my core values, which is that nostalgia is, ultimately, a poison, a way to project your discontent onto an imagined past that includes only your hazy, positive memories and none of the very real problems present in any historical period. Still, I recognize its fundamental appeal. Wouldn’t it be great to live in a time when professionals would be addressed in a friendly way by a shorthand nickname based on their well-respected job — “Teach,” “Padre,” and such? And wouldn’t it be great to live in a time when a high school teacher could spend so much time at the bar that the bouncers there would be like “Oh, that guy? The one who’s here so often that you easily recognize him? He’s a high school teacher, and no, I don’t really know how he can get up in the morning in time to get to class, given how much he drinks here every night.”

Herb and Jamaal, 2/10/25

Speaking of nostalgia, remember Herb and Jamaal, the strip I used to talk about mostly to make fun of its extreme nonspecificity? I let it drop off my rotation a while back due to [some throat-clearing here to gloss over how I get access to comic strips in such a way that allows me to have each post written and published by around 4 am every day and sometimes accidentally earlier] but now I’ve gotten another source on them, and the big question is: are our heroes still telling cutting-edge jokes about what’s going in the present day? The answer, surprisingly, is yes! Just as I’ve found new sources for comics access, Herb and Jamaal have dug into the informal supply chain and acquired one (1) egg, a precious commodity in our current H5N1-afflicted hellscape! Unfortunately, given that the two of them run a restaurant together, this seems like it’s not going to scale up in a way that will be helpful to them.

Dick Tracy, 2/10/25

I hate to admit it, but I couldn’t really get into the Dick Tracy fights the neo-Nazis storyline that’s wrapping up now — fights quite literally, as all the bruises on Dick and Sam’s faces will tell you. Having tuned out, I’m honestly not sure who “himself,” sitting at the bar and enjoying a healthy lettuce sandwich on white bread while he plies our lawmen and -women with a gelatinous nacho blob, is supposed to be. Should we recognize him from the story so far? Is he some new character heralding the next adventure? Is he Michael Kilian himself, the bar owner, or possibly Michael Kilian himself, the guy who used to write Dick Tracy until he died in 2005, paving the way for the truly deranged Locher era? More on this as it develops, if I can maintain my attention span for it, which I probably can’t.

Family Circus, 2/10/25

Look, I’m not saying that “become a radfem separatist and eject all boys from the Keane Kompound” is the correct reading of the King James translation of the Lord’s Prayer, but I’m willing to wait and see where exactly Dolly is going with this.

Shoe, 2/10/25

Roz’s diner in Shoe is on the receiving end of a trope that generally rubs me the wrong way, which is “This is the place where the characters hang out all the time, but they also talk shit constantly about how bad it is, and they’re really mean-spirited about it.” But if Roz really strikes up conversations with her customers by saying things like “So, you’re gonna die soon. Are you being irresponsible about it?” then maybe her naysayers have a point.

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Mary Worth, 2/9/25

I have not really been talking about this Mary Worth plotline much, because it turns out that seeing a big beefy asshole act in a way that’s clearly emotionally abusive towards his girlfriend and feels like it could become physically abusive at any moment isn’t “fun” or “funny” the way most of the dysfunctional antics in this strip are. However, when the big physical confrontation takes the form of a shove to Jared’s chest so feeble that even he seems surprised by it? And Dawn reacts with the supporting attack of “accidentally” dropping a bowling ball on Dirk’s foot? And then he calls her something truly gasp-worthy, probably a “Christ-abandoned trollop”? Well, even I have to admit: that’s pretty funny, and it gets even funnier when you see that poor Aeschylus, who wrote a civilization-defining trilogy about ghastly cycles of murder and revenge and divine wrath only being resolved by Athena founding institutions of human justice, has been dragged in to provide a sheen of legitimacy to the proceedings. Don’t worry, though: none of the bajillion websites that have this quote on them tell you which play it’s from, which is a good sign that it’s made up, so Aeschylus is in fact chilling in the Greek underworld and does not need to trouble himself with Dawn’s romantic trials. (Google’s Gemini AI on separate queries tried to tell me that the line is from The Remembered, which is not an actual play, and that while it’s not from a specific play it captures the themes of the Oresteia, which is pretty funny in its own right.)

Blondie, 2/9/25

There’s a lot of questions to ask here (Who are these people and why are they attending Dagwood’s Super Bowl party in lieu of any of his actual friends or acquaintances? How committed are they to the old-time football helmet bit? Is that one guy supposed to be British?) but mostly I want to criticize the final panel. This is the comics! What you depict is only limited by your imagination! Why is this set up to imply that even within the universe of the strip, one of these guys is just visualizing a military flyover, when the artist could’ve just depicted a squadron of actual fighter jets swooping low over Dagwood’s suburban neighborhood, deafening and terrifying everyone for miles around and, if we’re lucky, dropping a BLU-109/B “bunker buster” bomb on the Bumstead residence and ending our national nightmare forever?

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Blondie, 2/8/25

Man, what’s your least favorite part of this deeply unpleasant Dagwood dream sequence? A lot of people are going to say “the glasses on the sandwich” or “the pot of gumbo on a burner that’s just kind of floating in space” or “the way you can’t quite tell if Dagwood is driven to chase the anthropomorphic sandwich by hunger or something more darkly sexual” or maybe even “why did they bother mentioning the Super Bowl but not put any football stuff in the dream sequence”, but for me, it’s the little “Po Boy” label on the sandwich. Like, come on. Do you expect us to believe that Dagwood would need to have a sandwich label in his own dream? Absolutely not. I don’t care if the idiot readers at home need to have the fact that this is “the Big Easy”‘s signature sandwich spelled out for them, I refuse to accept the way it compromises the verisimilitude of the dream sequence.

Hi and Lois, 2/8/25

Feel like this strip is the result of coming up with “the big bag store” as a darndest thing a kid would call Costco, but that’s really undermined by the fact that there are no bags in the strip. Everything is in boxes! That’s actually one of Costco’s whole things! Plus “big box store” is already a thing people say so you could have it be a double meaning? C’mon, man!

Six Chix, 2/8/25

Sorry to get all indignant there for a minute, I’ll try to chill out. Hey, were you worried that, what with all the apps today and such, Cupid wasn’t getting laid anymore? Well, good news.