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Blondie, 8/12/15

The structure of the joke in this strip is straightforward enough: Dagwood feels good about himself, a state of affairs that will soon be undone by his abusive rage-monster of a boss. But something about the way that everyone around him keeps shouting “Dag swag!” at him seems profoundly off. Are we to view the entire strip as a dream sequence, in which Dagwood’s exaggerated sense of importance and centrality will soon be inverted into persecution at the hands of a cruel father figure? Or is this catchphrase intended to establish the name of a line of Blondie-branded menswear, in a second and hopefully less disastrous attempt to cash in on the strip’s intellectual property?

Pluggers, 8/12/15

You’re a plugger if you’re a hideous man-beast who, despite walking upright and wearing clothes and owning property, still has the unshakable urge to establish dominance within your kin-group by aggressively urinating in your offspring’s newly established territory.

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Mary Worth, 8/11/15

I moved to Baltimore in 2002, and, as was the style at the time, subscribed to home delivery of the local print newspaper, which had four glorious pages of comics, including the soap opera strips, which I had never really read before. The Mary Worth storyline in progress at the time involved a cantankerous old man named Smitty Smedlap, who was in the midst of a dinner with Mary and Jeff at the Bum Boat that, I swear to God, lasted for weeks, much of which spent with him complaining that he didn’t like fish (or, as he called it, “feesh”). I found it riveting, not least because, as the dinner unspooled day after day, I wasn’t sure who, if anyone, I was supposed to like. Was this dinner unusually comically full of mutual irritation for the strip, or was everything like this? Thus, I have high hopes that this meal will go on interminably as well, with Ian increasingly desperately trying to convince his boss to move into his condo complex for the most tenuous of reasons; in this case, though, any newcomers wondering how exactly they’re supposed to understand what’s happening will be helped out by Toby’s “can you get a load of this shit” facial expression.

Dennis the Menace, 8/11/15

Dennis the Menace has definitely crossed some kind of line today by having a panel in which Dennis isn’t present and Mr. Wilson says a cranky old man thing that isn’t Dennis-related at all. Is America ready for this feature to slowly become entirely Wilson-centric, with each day’s “joke” consisting of Mr. Wilson angrily informing his wife or some unfortunately passerby that things today are bad, especially things that involve or cater to young people? I’ll bet it is!

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Hi and Lois, 8/10/15

Oh, man, I’m so glad we get to share this most special moment between a parent and child: the moment where childish bullshit stops being humored. “Look, dad, I made a whimsical, silly thing for you, based on my limited understanding of your grown-up interests!” “Wow. Wow. This variation on golf and bowling you just made up? It’s not practical at all. It certainly doesn’t sound like much fun. And this so-called ‘rule-book’ is just four sheets of paper that you didn’t even bother stapling together. This is a God-damned disgrace, son. I’m just going to let the muscles of my hand go slack so this nonsense flops down onto the floor. It’s certainly not worth getting up and walking all the way over to the garbage can for.”

Beetle Bailey, 8/10/15

The Army has long refused to take the very real problem of Beetle Bailey’s constant physical abuse at the hands of his superior officer seriously, and I’m not sure what’s more insulting: that somebody told Beetle that they had set up a special number to report abuse when obviously no such thing exists, or that they didn’t even bother making up a fake number with the right number of digits.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/10/15

Haw haw, Doc, Snuffy’s already laughin’ at your joke, Doc, so it looks like you won’t even have to tickle him! It almost makes up for the fact that your clinic in this impoverished rural community can’t afford any actual medication!