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Mary Worth, 12/8/23

Just from the standpoint of hard-hitting social drama, I think “Young Sonia is seduced to leftism by a guy in a dumb hat” is like a thousand times less interesting than “Young Sonia is dating/in love with a guy in a dumb hat who’s old enough to be a plausible romantic interest for her mother.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/8/23

After spending all week honing his skills in traditional Appalachian musicianship, Jughaid has discovered that his grandfather is happy to play a ghastly parody of a hillbilly rustic so as to grab hold of a few flatlander dollars in what many are calling the grimmest Snuffy Smith in years.

Dennis the Menace, 12/8/23

“George, I see you once a year and don’t know anything about you that isn’t in your chart, so feel free to not make what appear to be jokes about whoever ‘Dennis’ is and this whole thing will go a lot faster.”

Hi and Lois, 12/8/23

“Plus AI is incredibly computationally intensive and is driving up electricity usage, and thus contributing to global warming. So, win-win!”

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Marvin, 12/7/23

Man, if you’re embarrassed about people (and dogs?) seeing the picture of you in the hat why are you … wearing the hat outside where all these other dogs can see you? I feel like this week’s Marvin is really getting into something very heady about the sign and the signified and I am not high enough to follow it.

Shoe, 12/7/23

I appreciate the fact that today’s Shoe goes out of its way to make sure we know these guys are drinking and emotionally opening up to one another right next to the bathroom. Not sure if we’re supposed to think of them as old dudes with bladder control problems or birds with cloacae, but either way they conveniently have only a few steps to cover when nature calls.

Blondie, 12/7/23

Dagwood isn’t upset that Elmo used the newfangled word “influencer”; it’s just that he can’t realistically have been born before about 1969 and is very mad Elmo thinks Bob Hope and Bing Crosby are from “his day”.

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Bizarro, 12/6/23

A fun fact is that while “Frankenstein,” in the sense of a story about creature sewn together from corpses and reanimated via forbidden science with unexpected results, is in the public domain, Frankenstein’s monster, in the sense of the green-skinned corpse guy with a flat head and bolts in his neck, is the intellectual property of Universal Studios, for whom that design was created in 1931. I really had it in my mind that the flat top of the head was meant to indicate that the skull had been sliced open to drop a brain into it, but I can’t find any citation to that now; however, the Wikipedia article for Frankenstein’s monster does have the unsettling note that “Jack P. Pierce … based the monster’s face and iconic flat head shape on a drawing Pierce’s daughter (whom Pierce feared to be psychic) had drawn from a dream.” Anyway, today’s strip raises a lot more questions than it answers: are the Monster and his Bride having sex, reproductively, and are their corpse-mangled qualities passed down to their offspring via some Lamarckian mechanism? Or did the pair conspire to reproduce the sins of their creator, assembling in their own image a son from scavenged corpse parts, continuing the hideous cycle? Also, is the kid’s full name “Frankenstein’s Monster Junior,” and does he get mad if people just call him or his father “Frankenstein?” I honestly care about all this much more than his potential head injury situation.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/6/23

This week’s Rex Morgan is really just dragging out a plotline we had all hoped would be done by now, but honestly I’ve been enjoying a lot of the facial expressions so I’ll give it a pass. Today, Mr. Ollman (get it? he’s an “old man”????) has hit the end of his patience with this entire conversation, as his face in panel three makes very clear. “Look, doc, I came here because I need my prostate checked out and I heard you weren’t gonna give me a lot of pushback when I asked for a painkiller prescription. I stopped making new acquaintances 15 years ago, and I certainly don’t want to hear anything about some Italian I’m supposed to know, got it?”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/6/23

It seems to me that you should be rewarding a budding young musician for time spent honing and practicing his craft in whatever way works best for; demanding a new song in exchange for each cookie feels like it’s encouraging quantity over quality, just my take.

Gasoline Alley, 12/6/23

Rufus’s dick has burst out of his elf costume, right? That’s what’s going on here? He’s hanging hog? That’s what’s going to get the beloved comic strip Gasoline Alley cancelled after all these years? Rufus with his dick out?