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Apologies again for, in my COVID-addled haze, posting so many posts on the wrong days this week! Rest assured, however, that I followed the twisting timeline throughout the week and collected your comments, as appropriate. Here’s #1!

“The cable guy’s air of contentment is about more than just the opportunity to set down his tool box, put his feet up, and sit a spell. The naysayers and gloomcasters have been telling him for so many years that nobody keeps a live-in cable repairman anymore; this isn’t the glittering, prosperous 1980s, when enthusiasm for the exciting new medium of cable television was sky high and limitlessly coke-fueled. He’s fought to hold on to the era-appropriate wisdom of Flashdance and most other movies: when you give up your dream, you die.” –Violet

And here are the hilarious runners up!

“Lois strolls the Triangle d’Or en fleek in the hottest new Givenchy galoshes.” –Cleveland Mocks

“Wait, didn’t Lois put her magazine and glasses away and go to sleep? Hence the dreaming? Why is she suddenly awake and wearing glasses again in the … oh no. She’s being incepted! Wake up, Lois! None of this is real! Wake up before they make you deport yourself!” –jroggs

“I feel personally insulted by the fact that Marvin has seven panels that look completely identical, but upon close examination have clearly been completely redrawn for each one, with Megan looking slightly different even while being in the exact same pose (watch the mouth in particular). How do you create a strip that’s boring and repetitive to look at, yet still takes as much work as if you hadn’t resorted to talking heads? Own your laziness dammit!” –Morgan Wick

“I wanted to do a bit on internet searches that somehow reveal that a person is lazy and self-centered but I was too distracted by the way Megan is making eye contact with the reader. I know this is a problem for some child actors but I didn’t think child cartoons would stare at the camera.” –Victor Von

“What’s funny in this is that Dennis is delivering a pretty stock Mr Wilson punchline there. Which makes you wonder, is he destined to become his elderly neighbor in time, and get his own ‘brat noir’? [takes a drag of a cigarette] Time is a flat circle, man…” –pugfuggly

“Magical bagpipes that set the ears ablaze would explain how the king has managed to survive for as long as he has in a castle with walls so low that invaders could just lift each other over them.” –Tabby Lavalamp

“I’m not sure how one could visually depict a screeching noise, but a bunch of eighth notes flying around is not it.” –Flipper

“You know what? I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna say something nice about Bizarro, and that something is this: I want that art on the wall. Bigfoot job-hunting, whatever, that’s fine, I give it a C-, but upside-down hat-birdie is pretty great and I’d happily hang that in my office. Then again, if I did that, I’d be constantly thinking ‘That’s a piece of art I somehow sourced from Bizarro, of all things,’ and my life would be about 5% worse than it would be otherwise, so maybe it’s better this way. Godspeed, upside-down hat-birdie. I hope the [squints] lit stick of dynamite hanging next to you spares your upside-down life.” –els

“In the broader comics category of ‘children hear but don’t understand adult concepts’ and apply them in hilariously cute ways, Curtis has completely misunderstood the two’s compliment method for representing signed integers in digital computations.” –Hibbleton

‘Window?’ ‘Sign?’ Do you think this idea is good to convince rational people to walk in? No, it’s too stupid! It’s for social media!” –Ettorre

“You all are making jokes, but this is the unfortunate reality for those among us who adopt the furry lifestyle.” –Tom T.

“Mr. Wilson has a Dennis-sized tumor. Menace level: Stage 4.” –taig

“Trixie will be among the first generation with early-onset ‘YouTube Face.’” –Philip

“Pluggers aren’t just romantically smiling at each other, they’re predatorial carnivores and showing their teeth is a sign of aggression.” –Rex Thrillho, on Twitter

livedtotellaboutit.com points to an unconfigured Shopify site, which is significantly more menacing than whatever wisecrack Dennis used to break down his last three sitters. Commodify your trauma, sisters!” –I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV

“You’re a plugger if smiling hurts … because everything hurts. Life is a series of endless pain and suffering now as entropy is slowly killing you and it won’t stop until you die. Now, who’s ready for romance?” –OId Man Shadow

“Given that food is like sex for the Bumsteads, what we’re seeing in panel 3 is some kind of sick exhibitionism, and Herb’s wistful ‘You’ve got a gold medal wife’ takes on a whole new meaning. Do you think they ever swing together (i.e. eat meals cooked by each other’s wives)?” –Schroduck

Olympic Logo Eggs! Or, as they call it at down at the diner, Five Eggs!” –RoofPig

“I love that Billy and Jeffy are just staring at the Olympics crowd scenes, presumably changing the channel when the camera stops panning the stands and focuses on the boring actual sports.” –Thelonious_Nick

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Family Circus, 8/9/24

“Steve Tracy” here annoys me so much, because it feels like I’m supposed to know who he is, and despite being the Comics Curmudgeon I do not waste my valuable and declining brain cells on non-Keane Family Circus characters, OK? I guess he’s supposed to be one of Billy’s little friends, who in general don’t seem to recur as characters, possibly because Billy is pretty off-putting. Anyway, Billy, did you know that the Olympics are in France? Do you think “Steve Tracy” or any of your other shitty little friends have the financial resources or cultural savvy to go to France? What a frankly ludicrous notion.

Blondie, 8/9/24

Say what you will about Dagwood Bumstead, but he is a man capable of truly herculean feats of gastronomical engineering, routinely constructing improbably enormous sandwiches and stacking rows of plates up his arms for easier transport. The fact that he’s capable of expressing such cartoonish excitement about the fact that Blondie has arranged five eggs in a vaguely Olympic rings-shaped tableau on a serving dish just proves that he’s as down bad for her as he ever was, which after all these years is honestly quite sweet.

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PROGRAMMING NOTE: haha whoops I screwed up the days for several posts this week, here’s Wednesday’s if you haven’t seen that yet

Dennis the Menace, 8/8/24

Look, I respect the effort here — the fundmental underlying joke is pretty good, Alice’s indignant facial expression is funny, and Dennis looking genuinely hurt in the background is a nice touch. “Lived to tell about it.com” isn’t a great URL, though, because it honestly sounds like a site for something a lot more traumatic and kind of spoils the mood, and a much bigger problem is that it’s a website at all. A group of modern young baby sitters is simply not going to go to the trouble to buy a domain name and then set up a WordPress account for a group blog or whatever. They’d set up a community on social media somewhere — Facebook, maybe, Facebook groups have had a little bit of a comeback with younger people, or maybe whatever the TikTok equivalent is. Or a private Discord server! There probably isn’t a TikTok equivalent, now that I think about it, not that I would know, because I don’t go on there. What happens on TikTok is none of my business. The important thing is that I know that I don’t know, which Socrates would say makes me smart. I’m going to run with that. Anyway, nice try but botched execution, Dennis the Menace, I give this 6 out of 10 stars.

Gearhead Gertie, 8/8/24

I’ve decided that my favorite kind of Gearhead Gertie panels are the ones where she’s antagonizing her husband. This one is great because you could imagine that the joke is that this is the thinnest of pretenses over her attempts to establish a throuple, but it’s actually much more wholesome (or, depending on how you see it, more perverse): it’s all exactly as it seems, she just loves NASCAR that much, and it makes her husband crazy. The cable guy, despite his unconventional new living situation, doesn’t seem to notice this drama, or care about it if he does. He’s just happy to be there!

Pluggers, 8/8/24

These two pluggers aren’t just romantically smiling at each other after dinner. Obviously they are doing that — those tight faces and bugged out eyes simply scream “romance” — but there’s aslo something more to it. Thanks for cluing us in, Pluggers!