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Alexander and Dagwood are basically identical but have different noses and now I can’t stop staring at them

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Blondie, 12/23/21

Not to be smug, but the idea that cowboys on long-range cattle drives would kill the cows they were being paid to transport to market and then butcher and eat them out on the trail rang extremely false to me when I read this, and after about 15 seconds of Googling I found a Medium post from “a CPA who writes about a diverse set of topics including the American West, entrerpreneurship [sic], and the legalization of cannabis” that affirms my previously held opinion, so I’m going to go ahead and declare victory on this one. I’m not even going to bother looking up research on how many fortysomething dads are watching old western films with their teenage sons in real life in the year of our lord 2021, because I’m very sure the answer is zero.

Hi and Lois, 12/23/21

I was going to make fun of this, but you know what? I absolutely buy that two grade schoolers would believe that Santa only grew his beard out five years ago. “Yeah, five years ago is the first time I remember seeing him with a beard,” they think. “This tracks.”

Dick Tracy, 12/23/21

“I managed a small accounting firm! I don’t have any background in sex work. This is a mismatch to my skills and I resent it!”

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Tender and mild? In this economy?

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Dennis the Menace, 12/22/21

I’m sorry, I absolutely refuse to believe that a kid who goes to church on the regular would know what a “manger” is but also think Jesus’s name was “Wayne.” The only menacing thing here is Dennis’s obvious cognitive deficits.

Hi and Lois, 12/22/21

I guess the joke here is supposed to be that because Foofram Industries didn’t have a holiday party last year, this year’s is extra lit, and horny? I have a hard time squaring Thirsty’s line about not needing to spike the punch with the little bubble and asterisk things floating around amongst the partygoers, which are generally used in the comics to denote drunkenness, though I suppose in this case they could be representing the omicron variant of the novel coronavirus.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/22/21

“They’ll find something soon enough, because — and we’re married, so I know what I’m talking about here — you’re not actually very interesting.”

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Terrible babies (including Wilbur)

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Baby Blues, 12/21/21

Video is an illusion, a series of still images run in sequence so quickly that your brain can’t perceive them as individual pictures and instead smooths them together to create what appears to be movement. In animation, a smear is a trick that can heighten this sense of motion by using an individual frame that itself contains a blur or multiple still images of the moving figure. You can see some great examples here or follow this Twitter feed for more. The technique is also used in comics, sometimes to great effect! But sometimes it implies that a comic strip mom’s face is a nightmarish mass of writhing tentacles just barely contained by a protective mask, and by “protective” in this case, I don’t mean that the mask reduces transmission of the novel coronavirus, but rather that it holds back these awful and presumably slimy face-limbs from bursting out and squeezing the life out of us while we scream in terror.

Mary Worth, 12/21/21

I’m beginning to suspect that the larger point of this Mary Worth storyline is to tap into a near-universal situation: almost all of us have a loved one who is in a relationship with an obviously and objectively terrible person, and it interferes with our own friendship with them. Rather than trying to break them up, Mary implies, we should just accept that people come together for mysterious reasons of their own that we can’t understand. Which is a real cop out, considering that the reason Estelle and Wilbur got back together is because Mary told Estelle to take him back! It’s Mary Worth who’s responsible for your friend’s bad relationship decisions! Here, take this pitchfork and map to Charterstone.

Marvin, 12/21/21

There’s so much about Marvin the comic strip and Marvin the character I find objectionable, but at the top of the list, maybe even above the shitting, is when he gives the audience a smug, knowing look to accentuate some terrible punchline. “Eh?” he seems to asking us today? “Eh? Women be shopping? Sexism? Eh?”