Post Content

Blondie, 6/22/23

Let’s put aside, for the moment, the fact we’re dealing with three famous (?) comics couples here. What are the circumstances under which you’d have any three couples together like this to talk to Blondie and Tootsie about vow-renewal catering? Like, do they just have office hours specifically for potential vow renewers to drop by and chat? Or are they all doing this together, a mass vow-renewal process? Are they friends? Or — and now, finally, we must return to the fact that we’ve got three beloved (???) comics couples on our hands — is this for copyright reasons, somehow, and what they’re actually “renewing” is the rights of their intellectual property holders to the concept of their coupledom?

Mary Worth, 6/22/23

Lyle Lovett! It’s bad enough that you’re running an illegal underground dog-fighting ring. But now you’re drunk on the job? Try to show a little pride in your terrible, cruel work!

Post Content

Shoe, 6/21/23

Here’s a little free hint for comic strip writers everywhere: if you come up with a line of dialogue and you think, “Well, I can’t top that one,” that means you’ve found your punchline! You should probably think of a setup panel that leads into it, instead of just having one of your other characters say “Well, I can’t top that one” and calling it day.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/21/23

For some reason I think I assumed that Snuffy was a lone wolf chicken thief? But here’s Lukey, cheerfully engaging in poultry larceny with him. And in broad daylight! Please, Lukey, reconsider this life of crime, you have a family! At least I think you do? Clearly I don’t know you as well as I thought.

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 6/20/23

Some years back, the state of Maryland renamed the government agency in charge of courts, detention facilities, and parole supervision for kids under 18 from the “Department of Juvenile Justice” to the “Department of Juvenile Services,” and I can understand trying to get rid of a label that has punitive implications and maybe try to imply that you’re leaning towards rehabilitation, but (a) you can never win a race on the euphemism treadmill and (b) “Department of Juvenile Services” might falsely lead you to believe that the department was delivering services to young people that weren’t ultimately crime-and-punishment related. Anyway, I bring this up because I thought that was a pretty bad euphemism, but “Milford juvenile sports program manager” as a job title for a prison guard is frankly a lot worse.

Family Circus, 6/20/23

Now, obviously the joke here is that Jeffy is an idiot. But you have to admit that it does present us with a truly horrifying image of a world where children just a little older than Jeffy reach an age at which they lose their “child’s eyes” — maybe they cloud over and harden first, or maybe they just suddenly and painfully pop off the optic nerves, with the new, literate “adult” eyes emerging from bloody sockets over the next few excruciating weeks. This is a lot of body horror to just tell us that Jeffy’s an idiot, in other words, especially considering that most of us already knew that he was an idiot.

Hi and Lois, 6/20/23

The truly depressing thing here is that after nearly 70 years in publication, this strip hasn’t come up with enough of a personality for Ditto to give him a plausible joke.