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Mary Worth, 10/2/23

Do you think Mary aggressively pesters new Charterstone residents to accept her casserole-based hospitality because she wants them to feel welcome? Oh, you sweet summer child. No, her main goal is to get inside their apartment and engage them in seemingly casual chit-chat to see if either reveals a potential entry point for hard-core meddling. A lot of times it doesn’t work out, but do you sees Mary’s eyes here?

Normally that’s the kind of expression you’d expect when seeing an addict in the throes of a high after taking a big hit of their favorite drug, and in a way you’re correct. Mary is straight-up mainlining a surprise dose of Complicated Family Situation That May Benefit From Advice From An Outside Party, and I hope her heart can handle it.

Blondie, 10/2/23

Sorry, Blondie, you came so close to convincing me that you’re created by “real Americans” who enjoy NFL football, but then you got to “unemployment team” and your metaphor completely foundered. If one of your players sucks, you can just cut them from the team! You don’t have to trade them to anybody! If they’re as incompetent as Dagwood, probably no other team would want them!

The Lockhorns, 10/2/23

Leroy and Loretta live in a quintessential suburban neighborhood, but given Leroy’s Jets fandom and rail commute, I always assumed they were in Long Island, probably an older tract in Nassau County or maybe even outer Queens. Does this track with him apparently being a Nets fan? I was going to say that the Nets are kind of johnny-come-latelies to New York, but they moved from New Jersey 11 years ago, and since I firmly believe that the Lockhorns are millennials, that’s probably plenty long enough for Leroy to have committed himself to them. I’ll leave the final call here to New York-area readers, but I do want to add that in order for this joke to really land, we need to understand those shorts as being the big baggy kind that extend well past the knee, something difficult to depict on a gnomish creature like Leroy Lockhorn.

Pluggers, 10/2/23

They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but I think headlines like “Dozens of simple, down-home working-class Americans die after incorrectly parsing Pluggers panel” will not do this feature any favors.

Six Chix, 10/2/23

I dunno, given that these two functionally identical panels have a number of differences in detail showing that the second panel was mostly redrawn, I’m going to say that artist brought far more of herself to the job today than she really needed to.

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Mary Worth, 10/1/23

OK, I had a whole thing ready to go here about how the Sunday strips represent Mary’s self-aggrandizing memories/interpretations of events but the daily strips represent reality, because earlier this week Mary nosily asked Keith whether he had any family, yet in today’s version of the sequence we see him offering that information freely. But those thoughts were immediately blasted from my mind by the revelation that Keith has a SECRET (maybe even secret to him???) CHILD who has managed to track him down after only a few days in his new home. Maybe because Mary was tweeting about him nonstop on the official Charterstone Twitter account that she set up after Wilbur taught her to use social media? Anyway, I hope everyone is going to be curious and not judgmental about Keith’s unorthodox family situation!

Hi and Lois, 10/1/23

In 2011, the Huffington Post published an article entitled “What time does the Superbowl start?” which became legendary among those of us who toil in the mines of internet content for its naked understanding that internet publishing was about finding the answers to things people were looking for in the next ten seconds, not crafting clever headlines or providing in-depth information or whatever. It’s a milestone that probably passed unnoticed to most normies, even though we now live in a world mostly spawned by the same engine, where, for instance, physical restaurants have names like “Thai Food Near Me.” Anyway, more than a decade later, it seems that Hi and Lois is trying to get into the search engine optimization game, sadly unaware that Google does not index text in image files.

Dennis the Menace, 10/1/23

Oh, Henry! It seems that you’ve achieved every good thing in your life only as an act of revenge against those who doubted you

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Hagar the Horrible, 9/30/23

I think it’s very interesting that Hagar is ostentatiously drinking from a golden chalice in this strip. He and his warband have finally gorged themselves on enough material goods from the dying Carolingian Empire that they no longer need to exchange all the gold they steal to support their immediate material needs and can afford ornamental frippery. It makes sense, then, that today’s episode is a catty comedy of manners that could just as easily be taking place in the comfortable suburban world of Hagar and Helga’s distant Walker-Browne descendents Hi and Lois.

Gil Thorp, 9/30/23

Look, I can barely keep track of the sports stuff going on in Gil Thorp, OK? If you’re gonna try to tell me that Barnes and this blonde girl used to be involved romantically and I’m supposed to remember that, I’m simply going to say that I don’t have the spoons to deal with it at the moment, and will retreat to my comfort zone (staring in mesmerized awe at the detached claw-hand that has latched on to Barnes’ sweaty fact in panel three).

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/30/23

So wait, all these guys are criminals? Every last one of them? But they’re still boring as hell?

Dick Tracy, 9/30/23

Uh oh, looks like Tracy has a new nemesis in — The Case Of The Guy With A Knife Who Loves To Stab!