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Blondie, 2/10/22

One thing that Blondie absolutely loves doing is to mine broadly appealing cultural events like “the Big Game” for laughs in the most generic way possible, without getting into specifics like what team Dagwood roots for or violating sacred NFL trademarks. Anyway, it’s really too bad that so much of the joke-space of today’s strip is dedicated to that sort of weaksauce bullshit, because I am frankly quite intrigued by the way Dagwood has clearly become extremely and erotically fixated on the forbidden chili in the final panel.

Gil Thorp, 2/10/22

Gil Thorp has somehow made its teen gambling plot, in which Pranit is using his brother’s sportsduke dot com account to accidentally become a bookie, boring, so the girl’s plot is going to have to veer into more traditional troubled youth territory. Are you telling me that some high school seniors at a party might’ve had a third of a can of hard seltzer apiece? Watch out, everybody, we got a new Euphoria on the funny pages today!

Dennis the Menace, 2/10/22

Honestly, you have to really admire that the Mitchells are so dedicated to high culture that they keep coming to this fancy restaurant with a black tie dress code even though Dennis ruins the experience so consistently that the wait staff knows their name. Dennis is never going to be snooty like you, Henry! It’s just not going to happen!

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Mary Worth, 2/9/22

“Yes, it seemed that all hope was lost as I plunged into the cruel sea. But I lifted up a prayer to the Lord above to spare my life. ‘Please, heavenly Father,’ I asked, ‘let me live long enough to go to Toby’s next birthday party!’ Where is the birthday girl, anyway? Oh, she’s crying in the bedroom over her lost youth? Welp, more muffins for me, then, ha ha!”

Mark Trail, 2/9/22

Little does Wilbur know that when he took that plunge off the boat, he tore a hole right in the fabric of his own reality, splitting his soul in two! Sure, one half of him is back in Charterstone, right as rain — but the other, which must carry the weight of his misfortune, now haunts the nightmares of Rusty and all his little friends.

Daddy Daze, 2/9/22

Jeez, I know Daddy Daze has been getting increasingly depressing, but I still think that it’s a real escalation to do a week’s worth of strips where the Daddy Daze baby crushes the Daddy Daze baby by dropping a huge stuffed bear on him, and then the Daddy Daze daddy slowly dies, and then the Daddy Daze baby eventually dies of starvation as well.

Hi and Lois, 2/9/22

“When mommy just parks the car, puts San Diego in the GPS, and just sits there for an hour staring silently through the windshield, eventually sighing and turning the GPS off and going back home real slow? That’s less fun, I gotta say.”

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 2/8/22

Do you think the various bird-women with glasses that Mother Goose talks to in Mother Goose and Grimm are all supposed to be the same character, or do subtle differences in hair color and beak shape indicate that they’re a mostly interchangeable but still distinct series of interlocutors? I ask because if this strip is taking place less than a week after the one where Mother Goose wistfully said she wished her boyfriend shared her desire for a big church wedding, it would be quite poignant, but if she’s talking to same woman her boyfriend wants to have sex with, it just got a lot darker.

Mary Worth, 2/8/22

Just like Mary Worth, the character, tries to browbeat all her friends into tolerating Wilbur despite the fact that he’s obviously a monster, Mary Worth, the comic strip, is trying to get us to accept his continued existence by showing that his assholery can serve as a prompt for exciting new non-Wilbur storylines. It’s honestly working on me a little, as today’s second panel absolutely perfectly captures Toby just as her carefully buttressed emotional superstructure shatters into a million pieces, hopefully presaging a truly hilarious downward spiral in the weeks to come.

Dennis the Menace, 2/8/22

The only way I can understand Dennis the Menace doing a “Dennis teaches Joey that it’s OK for a man to cry when he’s sad” panel is by assuming that King Features has an entire lab dedicated to making the least menacing Dennis the Menace panel possible under the laws of physics as we understand them.

Pluggers, 2/8/22

You know, a lot of people think I’m a little too hard on the plugger demographic on this blog, but even I couldn’t come up with anything as mean as the plugger-identified reader who contemplated the characteristics that make up the plugger identity and then submit an entry that boils down to “pluggers sure take a long time to shit!”