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Hey, everyone! As I may have mentioned here in the past, I’m going to be at the South by Southwest Interactive festival for the next few days (I’m actually typing these very words on a plane winging its way from Baltimore to Austin)! I’ll be on a panel about the future of blogging (if such a thing exists) on Saturday morning, and generally going to dorky panels and bumming around town. So if you want get together and talk about, I dunno, new media, or money-making schemes, or what not, shoot me a line maybe we can meet up! I’ll also be documenting my experiences in a show diary for ITworld.com, if for whatever reason you can’t enough of that sort of thing. I will be doing my darndest to fit my normal comics-mocking into my busy schedule; apologies in advance if posts are late, or if more of them than usual have titles that include the words “quickies” or “one-liners.”

And now, to justify the existence of this post for the vast majority of you don’t care about anything in that last paragraph, here are some awesome vintage They’ll Do It Every Time panels sent in by faithful reader Rachel! (And those of you who have started reading this blog in the last few years, after the death of the feature’s final artist — well, check the archives, for awesomeness.) We begin in 1943, with the feature’s core creative mission — savage complaints about minor inconveniences, often tinged with sexism — was already well established. From a historical/anthropological viewpoint, we also learn that butter used to have its own counter at stores, and it took a long time to buy butter, for some reason?

Also of note is the mysterious Chinese take-out box on the counter labelled “oysters.”

Here’s another one from 1943 that offers a more interesting historical look at World War II than the last six months of 9 Chickweed Lane. Apparently it was common for serving GIs to hear drunken tales of exploits from World War I? Irritating, but the bowler-hatted fellow’s advice to drug the man’s drink seems a bit excessive.

Now let’s jump ahead to 1956. Here we’ve arrived at the two-panel ironic whiplash we know so well from the Scaduto era, though the subject is at this point rather quaint. Also familiar to longtime TDIET will be the “Howcum?” interrogative that starts the thing off.

Here’s another 1956 installment with a lot of features that would be right at home in the panels from the ’00s: the wacky, on-the-nose names (“Pothooks” and “Bigdome”), the generic white-collar office setting (though again the specific gripe is now thoroughly outdated), and, tucked away in the thanks-to note at the lower right, an (imagined?) act of savage violence.

And finally, a top ten list of gripes, again ranging from the familiar (bosses suck!), the familiar but probably no longer considered suitable for the comics (your husband spends the household budget on booze for his buddies!), and the archaic (burning trash befouls your line-dried laundry!). Not sure if the numbers are meant to be tongue-in-cheek; if not, they say a lot about the readership the trip once had — and the everlasting pettiness of the American people.

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Herb and Jamaal, 3/11/10

Ha ha, this is without out a doubt the greatest Herb and Jamaal ever. Rev. Croom just wants to have a little lunch in peace — but no, this little creep, the one who only shows up at church at Christmas and Easter, and whose mother-in-law he wishes would only show up at Christmas and Easter, has to badger him about eternity and crap. Fine, there’s nobody else here, there’s plausible deniability. “Sorry, kid, you’re going to be tortured in Hell for all eternity with the other damned souls,” he says, just stone-cold sucking his tea through a straw. “Now are you going to bring me my lunch or what?”

Mark Trail, 3/11/10

If I didn’t already know that this Mark Trail storyline was essentially a repeat of one that ran thirty years ago, I’d say that we’re witnessing a quantum leap forward in Trailian storytelling. As a rule, the narrative is relentlessly linear, and thus I assumed that yesterday’s shameless flirting was going to lead inexorably to some major plot point. Instead, it may have just been a bit of throwaway color meant to provide Mark with a key piece of information. Mark, meanwhile, seems to have made the monumental discovery that not every firing of a neuron in side his hair-helmeted skull needs to result in the immediate verbalization of the resulting idea: note in panel two that he’s actually managed to muster a genuine thought balloon. This first feeble specimen only encapsulates the vague notion of questioning, but with effort Mark may discover that it’s possible to think whole words or even sentences without saying them aloud.

Momma, 3/11/10

I find the scenario depicted here rather puzzling. It’s not because Momma’s being hit on by some gnomish bow-tied individual — there’s a lid for every pot, as my father once said to me, though in this case it appears to be a gold-digging lid; rather, I just have no clear idea of where exactly the action is supposed to be taking place. What setting might include a Momma-sized easy chair and a potted plant, but also be open to the public so that strangers might wander in and harass her? Is he cruising for babes down at the senior center?

Family Circus, 3/11/10

Little known fact: Grandma appears in the strip only occasionally because she spends most of her time — and most of her grandchildren’s’ inheritance — following ’80s glam-rock band Cinderella around the country. When Cinderella isn’t touring, she keeps busy jamming with her Cinderella tribute band, Glass Slipper.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/11/10

They’re still cousins, though, so this may make Thanksgiving dinner awkward.

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Luann, 3/10/10

I have emphasized repeatedly that I find the Brad-Toni relationship gross, but I do feel a need to mention now and again that I also find aspects of it — in particular, the weird ultra-chastity in practice underneath the layers of innuendo — baffling. Not necessarily because there aren’t young adults out there who for whatever reason hold back on the sexing, but because their relationship isn’t treated as unusually chaste; in fact, it’s treated as some kind of dangerous, smoldering time-bomb of lust that could destroy the world if not carefully monitored by Brad’s mother. Take Toni’s dialogue in the first panel today: “Don’t tell your mom I’m here! She’ll think I hang out!” Not … hanging out! Is there really a parent in America today whose adult offspring must hide the fact that his or her significant other is spending time at said offspring’s own house in what appears to be the middle of the day? Does Mrs. DeGroot expect that Brad and Toni will be interacting solely at church socials and via long, flowery letters up until the day they marry?

The thing is, I honestly don’t believe that anyone involved in the creation of the strip — not Greg Evans, and not his syndicate — thinks this is how humans in 21st century mainstream America behave. But there must be some kind of editorial edict handed down from on high that declares any mention or hint of sexuality between non-married people be completely verboten. But Evans seems to really want to do “Mrs. DeGroot is threatened by Toni’s sexual interest in Brad,” for some reason, which, taking those restrictions into account, ends up as “Mrs. DeGroot is threatened by any contact between Brad and Toni of any sort.” It just reads as … off, which is not really what you want in a comic strip, I don’t think.

Meanwhile, if we’re looking for things that are gross, let’s take note of the almost invisible musical “Hi honey” coming out of Brad’s phone in panel three.

Mark Trail, 3/10/10

And yet Mark Trail, of all strips, has no apparent qualms about depicting raw sexuality out in the country, with a sexy ranger and sexy backwoodsman’s daughter sexily sizing each other up, for sex. Buzz offers the most hilariously nonspecific and uninteresting explanation possible of his presence in her neck of the woods in panel three, and Jan’s reply that this mushy amalgam of vagueness “sounds interesting” indicates that she isn’t even listening to the blah blah coming out of his pretty mouth; she’s more interested in getting into those electric blue jeans and finding out if the carpet matches the drapes. (It doesn’t, if the eyebrows are any indication.)

Meanwhile, in the background, Mark appears to be on the verge of humping a Ski-Doo. Hey, man, whatever floats your boat! Literally!

Hagar the Horrible, 3/10/10

In other cartoon sex news, Hagar is supposed to be a sympathetic viewpoint character, despite his attempts to cheat on his long-suffering wife with ladies in Viking bars. The really weird aspect of this is that this is actually more or less a repeat of a four and a half year old joke, right down to the strip’s composition, and yet it’s been somewhat rewritten and apparently completely redrawn. Why not just take it to its logical conclusion and just run the damn thing again?