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Dick Tracy, 1/23/24

I think it’s sweet that these two ladies keep a poster of their deceased corpse-guy (he was a corpse-guy before he was deceased, to be clear) mentor/lover(?) around. Still, I don’t know how he’d feel about having extremely generic aphorisms attributed to him in response to extremely specific situations like “I accidentally poisoned the wrong person but I need to continue to earn my living as a stage magician.”

Marvin, 1/23/24

The funny thing here is that we definitely know that Marvin didn’t buy that “I [heart] daddy” mug; probably it was Jenny, in a desperate attempt to convince her husband that their child is worthy of human affection. Anyway, she’s wrong, he isn’t, and Jeff is right to take this free vacation and Jenny should go with him. Honestly they should change their names and never come back!

Blondie, 1/23/24

A pretty good sign, I feel, that I’ve lived my life right is that when a photo goes viral of a guy at a Detroit Lions game eating a comically large sandwich, multiple people send it to me with some variation of “OMG it’s Dagwood!” Anyway, I’m pretty sure Dr. Austin kept saying “oh my” has he brought increasingly advanced instruments to bear on Dagwood’s torso, which all readings indicate isn’t full of guts like a normal human’s but just an endless, insatiable ~v o i d~

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Family Circus, 1/22/24

Look, I’m not going to stand here and claim that the line between “saying the darnedest things” and “heresy” is a clear and bright one. But it does exist, and Ma Keane is seen here subtly but carefully policing it.

Hagar the Horrible, 1/22/24

Hey! This strip promotes the pernicious myth that the only qualification for being a Viking is that you like stealing stuff. That’s simply not true! You also have to like killing people, and we have no idea if this ex-banker has what it takes. (Surprisingly, you don’t have to like being in boats for long periods of time, as the puking guy up front makes clear.)

Crock, 1/22/24

Oops! Looks like the Legion took Poulet’s pessimistic assessment so seriously that they decided to fly the Black Standard of Muhammad to demonstrate that they had already gone over to the insurgents’ side and converted to Islam. Too late to back out now, fellas!

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Shoe, 1/21/24

This is a truly terrible joke and I don’t want to deal with it on any of it’s “humorous” levels but I think we should pause to think about the “college roommate” angle. The Perfesser is an extremely despress fifty(?)-something extremely bird-man who can’t maintain a romantic relationship and is doing the bare legal minimum to serve as a guardian for Skyler, the son of a presumably deceased sibling. This joke seems to require a close personal relationship to work and the only one that his creators can come up with for him is with a college roommate, someone he presumably hasn’t spent time with in decades. It’s extremely grim stuff, just like every other time we get the tiniest peek at the personal lives of any of the bird-people in this strip.

Gasoline Alley, 1/21/24

Hey guys, remember the Magic Eye books, from the ’90s? They were everywhere for a little bit and I was always bitter about it because I’m nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other and have terrible stereo vision as a result, so they never worked for me and I came to resent their popularity since it felt like they were mocking me personally. Anyway, that fad ended and I haven’t had to think about them for decades but now, uh, here’s today’s Gasoline Alley, I guess. Is this even going to work as a Magic Eye thing? Just a bunch of heads in a row? Anyone whose eyes work properly, please give it a shot and report back, though I won’t think less of you if you don’t, since I would not attempt to see these withered freaks in 3D even if I were physically capable of it.