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Blondie, 8/2/24

It’s always been very clear that Blondie takes place in one of the most whitebread towns imaginable, but I still think it’s pretty funny that (a) Lou knew that three years ago there would’ve been riots if he had tried to do anything with a Japanese theme so he just stuck to Olympic generics and (b) he also knew that even his “French” menu items had to actually just be American foods with “French” in the name, again, because of the riots. France! The country that loves meat and bread! The country that deep fries a ham sandwich and puts an egg on it! Once I was in Paris and I ordered something from the menu that that to my jet-lagged high-school-French-educated mind sounded good but I couldn’t quite figure out what it was and it turned out to be a plate of prosciutto with a stick of butter on it! And it was amazing! I think Dagwood, of all people, could handle it! Instead here he is, holding up an Olympic 10 scorecard that he presumably wrestled away from someone in his carpool because he’s not being offered anything “weird.” This is, in fact, profoundly sad.

Dennis the Menace, 8/2/24

I guess it’s not as sad as Mr. Wilson taking his Dennis Mitchell Derangement Syndrome everywhere he goes. George, this man has no idea who or what you’re talking about! He sees 20 patients a day and doesn’t remember who you are, he’s just reading something he scribbled last year on your chart! You’re embarrassing yourself!

Gasoline Alley, 8/2/24

Sorry I haven’t been keeping you up to date on Gasoline Alley but there was a little mishap involving Walt and the Frank Nelson tree cutter guy, where one thing led to another but it all worked out in the end and he got $500 knocked off his bill for his trouble, which means that he’s now able to do a little light insurance fraud, aided by the Almighty Himself.

Judge Parker, 8/2/24

“Ah shit! Once I realized that wasn’t my dad’s corpse in the water, I figured this was going to be some dark psychological trauma plotline and I didn’t have to tell anyone about it! I forgot that all middle aged men in this strip look pretty much exactly the same! Ah shit!”

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Tina’s Groove, 8/1/24

I’m honestly really starting to enjoy the 15-years-ago-ness of the Tina’s Groove strips offered up daily by the King Features website; for me, that lands in a nostalgic sweet spot that feels much more dated than Crock reruns from the ’90s or whatever. Like, remember the ’00s, when the only thing that could send a text message was a BlackBerry, and if you wanted to send such a message, you would ask your companion politely first? Of course you don’t, because that’s not really how it worked, but I suppose it might be how someone who’d never actually interacted with a BlackBerry user might think it worked.

Anyway, this strip obviously has a more timeless element to it, which is that Tina seems to have gone on a date (?) with a guy who she thought was Amish, but isn’t really. A good clue would’ve been his facial hair: mustaches were so strongly associated with soliders and militarism in early modern Germany that the pacifist Anabaptist sects that were the forerunners to today’s Amish and Mennonites foreswore them, leading to the distinctive chinbeard we associate with them today. Another way she could’ve guessed he wasn’t Amish is that he’s on date with her right now, since that’s pretty antithetical to their whole deal.

Mary Worth, 8/1/24

Don’t forget, Dr. Ed is an accomplished amateur pianist! I myself briefly forgot, and thought that maybe Estelle was doing an outwardly worshipful “Oh!” but an inwardly exasperated “Sigh!” because she actually was sick of his musical stylings, but no, that’s a worshipful “Sigh!” and her inner and outer selves are fully in alignment, which obviously makes for exciting conflict-free storytelling.

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Hi and Lois, 7/31/24

Trixie Flagston has, notoriously, been a baby for nearly 70 years, longer than most of us have been alive, and thought-balloons in complete sentences, so we think of her as having the mental capacity, knowledge, and experience of a much older child, or maybe even an adult. But if we are to take the narrative of the strip at face value, she is a baby, probably less than a year old, and we must therefore assume that she is constantly encountering new concepts and categories of object for the first time. Like today, for instance: she hears Ditto say “blocks” and assumes this castle will be made out of the stackable wooden cubes that she’s accustomed to smashing into and scattering with delight. Little does she know that these are new, unfamiliar Lego blocks, which will snap securely together, and which were possibly acquired by the twins specifically to protect their creations from their disruptive little sister! Surely that smug grin will be wiped off Trixie’s face when Dot or Ditto simply turns their castle back upright after Trixie’s attack, and a new a distressing fact about the world will settle into her mind.

Dick Tracy, 7/31/24

Hey, remember that guy who was being blackmailed over some salacious photos and was paying his mustachio’d blackmailer in cryptocurrency? Well, it turns out he owns a baseball team, or runs some other kind of “enterprise” for which he reports to the Commissioner of Baseball. Would that have made this storyline more interesting, if we had learned it earlier, before the MCU arrested all the bad guys? Maybe! But I guess we’ll never know, now.