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Beetle Bailey, 2/23/23

The joke here is clearly that Otto is imitating Beetle’s typical slothfulness, but wouldn’t it be funny if this were a lead-in to Sarge murdering Beetle, and this is the last thing the title character to this long running comic strip ever sees? Well, “funny” may not be quite the right word, unless you’re like me and have been reading this strip every day for years, waiting desperately for something, anything, to happen in it.

Hagar the Horrible, 2/23/23

Say what you will about Hagar the Horrible, but unlike many gag-a-day strips its team of gag writers works hard to keep track of the lore. Like, Hagar is canonically illiterate, which is why they’re careful to have him say “I was told” in the final panel. Anyway, what do you think the book is? Based on that description and the historical setting, I’m guessing it’s the Bible, in the form of a lovingly illuminated manuscript plundered from an Irish monastery that Hagar and his warriors burned to the ground.

Mary Worth, 2/23/23

“I want to be friends with him … but from a distance! Why can’t he understand that the most precious form of friendship is the kind where you’re never in the same room at the same time, and also you don’t like each other?”

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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!”