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Dustin, 2/22/23

Is a hot dog a sandwich? This question bubbled up from the bowels of the web in 2013, certainly a more innocent time for online discourse, before crossing over into the mainstream the next year, with discussion in The Guardian and a ruling that hot dogs and sandwiches are two different things from beloved friend of the blog Judge John Hodgman. Now, Dustin is a fundamentally middle-of-the-road institution that takes great pains to not offend anyone (other than young people, who are correctly assumed to not read newspaper comic strips), so it can’t stake out a position on such a controversial issue, but it wil venture to ask questions in a similar vein: are different kinds of sandwiches sandwiches? Yes, says Dustin, because a category can contain smaller and more specific categories. We hope you have found today’s strip insightful and amusing!

Dick Tracy, 2/22/23

Sure, that’s an awkwardly worded headline, but you have to understand that in Neo-Chicago newsworthy incidents that do not result in multiple horrible and disfiguring injuries are extremely rare, so you have to put the most important and interesting thing right at the beginning of the sentence.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/22/23

I can’t decide if this joke was written by someone who is blissfully unaware of “ha ha, hillbillies are all inbred” jokes, or by someone who is extremely aware of them and leaning way in because nobody cares about newspaper comic strips any more, God is dead so do as you will, etc.

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Slylock Fox, 2/21/23

So I guess these nightmare-bugs are supposed to be … termites? Or some other horrible bug that feasts on wood, but I’m not going to bother researching what that might be because I’d probably end up seeing actual photographs of these nightmares, which is definitely not something I’m up for. My point, though, is that clearly whatever sinister process granted sapience to the animals of the Slylockverse did so to even the very tiny and very gross among them. The question that today’s strip raises is whether these bugs, as part of their transformation, achieved human-scale proportions in defiance of the square-cube law, or if they remained tiny but their chefs carve bits of wood into miniature replicas of full-sized logs, as part of a elaborate culinary culture that we’re just getting a glimpse of here.

Pluggers, 2/21/23

Pluggers is, of course, a fundamentally sad text, a ongoing and often quite grim paean to a supposedly bygone set of mores. Today, however, may be the first panel I can remember in which the practice being held up as an object of nostalgic longing is just obviously, demonstrably worse than what we have now. “Oh, can you kids today block that creepy guy you work with on Instagram so he doesn’t post borderline sexual comments on every one of your selfies, and also complain to HR about him? In my day, if I didn’t want to know he was jerking off, I would have to just leave my phone off the hook so that he couldn’t call me and nobody could either, and also quit my job!”

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Mary Worth, 2/20/23

This upcoming court battle is going to settle an important precedent: can legal action be taken against someone for stuff they do in your hallucinations and dreams? Normally this would seem to be a slam dunk to get thrown out of court immediately, but I can see a judge learning about Wilbur’s whole deal and gruffly saying “I’ll allow it,” then saying the same thing when the jury somehow imposes the death penalty.

Beetle Bailey, 2/20/23

Wordle was made public in October 2021, and went viral a couple months later when the ability to turn your results into an emoji grid was added. In other words, Beetle Bailey has name-checked a popular culture thing a mere 14 months after it entered popular culture, which is really shocking for a strip that only started depicting the Army as racially integrated in 1970.

Gil Thorp, 2/20/23

“Kaz leaving was a gut punch for me. Devastating. Something I’ll never get over. My best friend, gone, leaving a hole that can never be filled. Oh, wait, you’re asking about the team? They don’t really give a shit. They’re teenagers! I honestly don’t think they can tell most adults apart.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/20/23

Can you imagine if a guy you’d been seeing casually announced that he’s moving to be closer to you, but then mentions that he’s also doing it to be closer to Buck Wise? That’d be a real emotional roller coaster, and one that by rights ought to end either with a breakup or a written agreement that you never have to be in a room with Buck for more than ten minutes at a time.