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Blondie, 11/2/22

I had a whole riff ready to go here about how I’m not a prude and it’s not like I think legacy comics characters shouldn’t feel and express sexual desire but I’m not a huge fan of Alexander Bumstead, a freakish-looking teen carbon copy of his father, being “hot for teacher,” but then my brain short circuited when I noticed his sister was wearing Crocs. Crocs! Recognizable footwear worn by real, normal people, in a world where these kids’ dad wears a tuxedo with a single dinner-plate sized shirt button to his utterly generic office job. It’s madness, I tell you! Madness!

Dennis the Menace, 11/2/22

This could’ve been a joke about how Margaret is smart and snobby about being smart while Dennis is menacingly stupid if they hadn’t literally put a heart on her sleeve. As it is, it’s just panel about two kids who don’t really understand metaphors, which, I hate to say it, isn’t particularly funny or interesting.

Family Circus, 11/2/22

Ha ha, look at how genuinely upset Billy looks! This kid has definitely done some crimes and is panicking that the so-called “constitutional protections” he learned about in his liberal public school do not apply in the Keane Kompound.

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Funky Winkerbean, 11/1/22

Huh, well, I guess Funky really is shutting down Montoni’s after all? This of course provides a great opportunity to trace the experiences of these longtime beloved characters as they move into a new phase of their lives do some nostalgia bullshit about the good old days of the strip, which, in a visual medium like the comics, is obviously best delivered by a wall of text and some photos that would be 100% invisible to anyone reading this in a newspaper, if anyone still read newspapers.

Judge Parker, 11/1/22

Gloria’s righteous rage has led her and Sam to the home of the judge at the heart of this mystery, where she won’t stop righteously ringing her doorbell until she gets answers! Of course, you might find her righteousness a little misplaced given that the judge himself just had most of his family brutally murdered, either by crooked cops or meth gangs or maybe his own son, so maybe he doesn’t want to chat about your wounded but still alive husband, Gloria, jeez.

Beetle Bailey, 11/1/22

I was going to do a whole riff here along the lines of “Ha ha, you know your legacy comic strip has been going on for 70+ years when the only new joke you can come up with is ‘What if one of our characters were covered in ticks?’”, but then it occurred to me that this is a strip about golf, the official pastime of legacy comic strip creators, and maybe the risks of tick infestation are everyday “relatable” content to these guys. Good to know that I can add “could end up with Lyme disease” to “boring” and “expensive” on my list of reasons why I don’t play golf.

Mary Worth, 11/1/22

Mary Worth is not just entertaining: it also seeks to impart important life lessons to its readers. This week that lesson is “don’t stand on cliff edges,” which may seem obvious to you but you never know who needs to hear it!

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Slylock Fox, 10/31/22

The thing I absolutely love and respect about Slick Smitty is that every time we see him, Slylock and the animal cops have him absolutely dead to rights, yet he still has the shit-eating grin on his face that says that he doesn’t believe he’ll receive any consequences for his actions or simply doesn’t care about them if he does. That’s true even in circumstances like today’s, when he’s dressed in an extremely stupid costume in order to pull of an even stupider crime, and hooked up to one of those lie detector machines that the animals have advanced from the current level of “not a lie detector, just a detector of elevated heart rates and other physical activity” to “detects lies, but unable to understand low-level ‘truths’ and ‘falsehoods’ as part of a larger semantic context.”

Dick Tracy, 10/31/22

I’ve had my differences with Vitamin Flintheart in the past, but I respect his theater company’s total commitment to verisimilitude. They have access to an extremely lifelike robotic dog that can talk, and yet they’re still trying to find a trained real dog for the non-talking scenes! You don’t want the human actors to start worrying about getting replaced by robots, now do you.

Gasoline Alley, 10/31/22

Say what you will about Gasoline Alley, but as its name implies, it began as a strip about people talking about motor vehicles, so I have to respect the amount of panel space it’s dedicating to people going into great detail about the different kinds of garbage trucks in use today.