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Your comment of the week is HERE! BAM!

“For a ‘Boy, that scheduled event sure is happening’ type of easy ‘topical’ Blondie strip, today’s offering is tremendously confused in a lot of ways. Probably the strangest part is Glasses Guy reacting with bafflement to his own score card, but the worst off here is Herb, who is going to have a miserable time describing this distracting impromptu comedy bit in court after he gets arrested for running over Elmo.” –jroggs

As are your RUNNERS UP! KAPOW!

“Wilbur kept that fish prisoner in a small box all his life and he wants to be thanked for that. He has the mentality of a serial killer, but not the physique.” –Ettorre

“In the 1960s when artist Neal Adams first took over Batman, he would unilaterally draw all the daytime scenes as night scenes to emphasize the mysterious nature of the character and get away from the campy 60s version. By the time the writer and editor figured out what was going on, it was too late. Fans were demanding more of that version of Batman. This is my longwinded way of saying June should just take it upon herself to always draw Wilbur as a talking fish from now on.” –Where’s Rocky?

Are we there yet? I gotta go to the bathroom? These are the mildest, most cliched ‘misbehaviors’ anyone could imagine. Show us the restaurants Dennis burned down! The landmarks he ‘accidentally’ desecrated! Is this child a menace or an… [scrambles to find a rhyme for menace] apprentice?” –Victor Von

“There have been countless gags involving Dagwood’s barber over the years, and that guy in today’s strip is definitely NOT Dagwood’s barber. Dagwood’s real barber also has a penchant for practical jokes, so presumably the gag here was that Dagwood was supposed to say ‘Hey! You’re not my barber!’ But Dagwood doesn’t care enough to even notice. That hurts. The joke’s on you this time, Dagwood’s barber.” –Peanut Gallery

“There is nothing I want less from Hi and Lois than references to real-world horrors. Vladimir Putin does not exist in the Walker-Browneverse. The Soviet Union never fell, Khrushchev is still General Secretary, and Hi grumbles about the Commies with his colleagues over a three-martini lunch, forever and ever and ever.” –Schroduck

“I love the tableau in Family Circus, but the caption is all wrong. Bil demands Jeffy play smooth jazz piano for hours while he reads newspaper after newspaper, some of them not even current. It’s just one of his quirks. The boy has momentarily stopped playing, and Bil rebukes him with blank, eyeless rage. ‘Please, father,’ Jeffy says, ‘I’m so very hungry and my fingers are bleeding onto the keys.’” –Violet

Mentioning 2024 current events in the background of a discussion from 1968? We’ve reached peak Hi and Lois, folks.” –Rube

“Is it just me, or is Willa giving Wilbur a really patronizing look? ‘Spoke to him even? Well that’s super, meat sack. I just spoke to the water filter. It said Clean Me.’” –pugfuggly

“Why do all the fish depicted in this strip have such vapid grins on their faces? Is there a product called ‘fishnip’ which is the piscean equivalent of catnip?” –Bob Tice

“I see Dagwood’s been watching the Olympics’ newest sport, arm-extension speed ambling.” –Thelonious_Nick

“Oh sunbeam, please help me destroy these iniquitous people and all their works…” –Dennis Jimenez

“When a conversation distorts your face to the point that you could be on the Dick Tracy Nemesis List, well, that’s a bad conversation.” –MKay

“What today’s strip really tells us, once again, is that Trixie is a baby who lives on the floor. Now, in a normal household, a baby might be placed on the floor for a while, on a carpet or a nice, soft blanket, presumably surrounded by a few baby toys and with at least one adult to supervise and interact with her. But, nope, this one is just a floor baby, left to fend for herself, with no help or stimulation of any kind, and no companionship other than a natural element she’s anthropomorphized into a pretend friend (hello, ‘Sunbeam’). She has nothing to hold or play with, and nothing to do other than wallow in her own thoughts. Her most optimistic hope is that her favored older siblings might happen to drop one of their own many belongings to her level, like a dog waiting patiently waiting for table scraps. Yes, this is the reality that Trixie Flagston has been living in for almost 70 years — and if she ever does grow up, there’s gonna be hell to pay.” –BigTed

“If this guy is a lapsed Amish man who left the sect after rumspringa, it stands to reason that he would be more courteous with his use to technology during meals. It would also be interesting if, by moving to the city and being a mixture of modern tech and old school dress, values, and handcrafted wares, he wasn’t secretly the first hipster, the only one who wasn’t doing it ironically.” –Philip

“Next on Mary Worth: Stell sighs again as Dr. Ed plays his new song, ‘I’m your Wilbur Rebound’, featuring such rousing lyrics as ‘I got the dish, he got the fish.’” –DNH

“Say what you want about Wilbur, at least he didn’t have Estelle doing actual paper filing in the year of our Worth 2024.” –Tabby Lavalamp

“Well, that’s a common misconception about the Amish, that we’re anti-technology as a block. Most Amish communities have at least one phone, and many barns have electrical power because it’s safer. It’s really about over-reliance on technology, using technology to make life easy, as opposed to some blanket ban on anything older then the wheel. Anyway, none of that matters, because I said ‘Amway,’ not ‘Amish,’ and you look like someone who wants to be their own boss.” –Voshkod

Cerebral … atherosclerosis … rule out senile dementia with signs of delusion… Tell me more about this ‘pain in the neck,’ Mr. Wilson?” –I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV

“Dagwood may be Lou’s only customer, but you know who’s making bank right now? Larry the sign guy. It’s your time to shine, buddy!” –OId Man Shadow

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Blondie, 8/2/24

It’s always been very clear that Blondie takes place in one of the most whitebread towns imaginable, but I still think it’s pretty funny that (a) Lou knew that three years ago there would’ve been riots if he had tried to do anything with a Japanese theme so he just stuck to Olympic generics and (b) he also knew that even his “French” menu items had to actually just be American foods with “French” in the name, again, because of the riots. France! The country that loves meat and bread! The country that deep fries a ham sandwich and puts an egg on it! Once I was in Paris and I ordered something from the menu that that to my jet-lagged high-school-French-educated mind sounded good but I couldn’t quite figure out what it was and it turned out to be a plate of prosciutto with a stick of butter on it! And it was amazing! I think Dagwood, of all people, could handle it! Instead here he is, holding up an Olympic 10 scorecard that he presumably wrestled away from someone in his carpool because he’s not being offered anything “weird.” This is, in fact, profoundly sad.

Dennis the Menace, 8/2/24

I guess it’s not as sad as Mr. Wilson taking his Dennis Mitchell Derangement Syndrome everywhere he goes. George, this man has no idea who or what you’re talking about! He sees 20 patients a day and doesn’t remember who you are, he’s just reading something he scribbled last year on your chart! You’re embarrassing yourself!

Gasoline Alley, 8/2/24

Sorry I haven’t been keeping you up to date on Gasoline Alley but there was a little mishap involving Walt and the Frank Nelson tree cutter guy, where one thing led to another but it all worked out in the end and he got $500 knocked off his bill for his trouble, which means that he’s now able to do a little light insurance fraud, aided by the Almighty Himself.

Judge Parker, 8/2/24

“Ah shit! Once I realized that wasn’t my dad’s corpse in the water, I figured this was going to be some dark psychological trauma plotline and I didn’t have to tell anyone about it! I forgot that all middle aged men in this strip look pretty much exactly the same! Ah shit!

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Tina’s Groove, 8/1/24

I’m honestly really starting to enjoy the 15-years-ago-ness of the Tina’s Groove strips offered up daily by the King Features website; for me, that lands in a nostalgic sweet spot that feels much more dated than Crock reruns from the ’90s or whatever. Like, remember the ’00s, when the only thing that could send a text message was a BlackBerry, and if you wanted to send such a message, you would ask your companion politely first? Of course you don’t, because that’s not really how it worked, but I suppose it might be how someone who’d never actually interacted with a BlackBerry user might think it worked.

Anyway, this strip obviously has a more timeless element to it, which is that Tina seems to have gone on a date (?) with a guy who she thought was Amish, but isn’t really. A good clue would’ve been his facial hair: mustaches were so strongly associated with soliders and militarism in early modern Germany that the pacifist Anabaptist sects that were the forerunners to today’s Amish and Mennonites foreswore them, leading to the distinctive chinbeard we associate with them today. Another way she could’ve guessed he wasn’t Amish is that he’s on date with her right now, since that’s pretty antithetical to their whole deal.

Mary Worth, 8/1/24

Don’t forget, Dr. Ed is an accomplished amateur pianist! I myself briefly forgot, and thought that maybe Estelle was doing an outwardly worshipful “Oh!” but an inwardly exasperated “Sigh!” because she actually was sick of his musical stylings, but no, that’s a worshipful “Sigh!” and her inner and outer selves are fully in alignment, which obviously makes for exciting conflict-free storytelling.