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Blondie, 6/14/22

The first panel of today’s strip sent me into an emotional state that, if you’re a frequent reader of this blog, you know I experience far too often: indignation that a comic character’s whole longstanding deal is being ignored for the sake of a joke! OK, sure, Blondie started her catering business in 1991, which was a full 61 years after this strip was started, but it was also 31 years ago, so I think it counts as pretty well-established, and the lore is that Blondie and Tootsie run a full-on catering business, not a “sandwich shop.” But by the time I got to the end of this strip, I realized what was happening: this guy is one of Dagwood’s buddies from the online forums for real sandwich sickos hosted on the dark web. Anonymity on those sites is the rule of the day so that people can post their innermost desires without fear, but Dagwood managed to dox this guy and told Blondie just to say “the s word,” as the sandwich community puts, and she’d get a loan in no time. And people say Dagwood’s lazy! He’d do anything for his wife, even betray the most sacred trust among sandwichlads.

Dennis the Menace, 6/14/22

Dennis at age 6 realizing that sating one’s appetites to excess can rob those appetites of their pleasure, yet pressing on with mindless consumption nonetheless: reaching a new threshold of personal self-menacing. Or he’s just disgusting and covered with bits of food, one or the other.

Dick Tracy, 6/14/22

Look, Dick Tracy, none of us are interested in playing “the long game” with you and filing these little clues away for payoffs months or years in the future, OK? We want one thing out of you, and it’s murders, murders, murders.

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Crock, 6/13/22

Crock has been in perpetual reruns ever since its creator died and his son decided that doing the thing so many people in this industry do where they continue putting out their father’s strip would be not that much fun, actually, so despite the up-to-date dates on these they were all published years or decades ago. Generally this doesn’t matter much because Crock is “timeless” (detached from any kind of reality as we know it so it can indulge in its elaborately unfunny internal universe) but every once in a while you get a strip like this, with an out-of-nowhere SLAM on some long-irrelevant bit of pop culture detritus. The big question here: is this a wholly justified attack on The Da Vinci Code, the novel from 2003, or on The Da Vinci Code, the movie from 2006? And is its selection as the rerun strip for today meant as an attack on The Da Vinci Code, a stage play that will be running in London for most of this year, or is that just a coincidence? (Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon would, of course, say there are no such thing as coincidences.)

Curtis, 6/13/22

Speaking of out-of-nowhere slams, Curtis has this intermittent running bit where Curtis wildly overestimates the edginess of some webcomic and it feels like a beef with a specific webcomic but I’m not sure which one? I hope they’re aware of Curtis’s laser focus on them, though. I hope they opened the comics pages today and saw Curtis saying to them “Are you just doing Crankshaft jokes? We already have a Crankshaft, buddy, we don’t need you” and felt that burn deep in their soul.

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Mary Worth, 6/12/22

The thing about Mary Worth, the character, as well as Mary Worth, the strip, is that they are both very moralistic in tone but their actual morality is often pretty flexible. One of the very first storylines featured on this blog involved Mary telling her friend Anna to pursue an old flame at her high school reunion, even though he was now married. Fortunately, he turned out to be recently divorced so that he and Anna could almost immediately get married themselves, but the point is that you’d think Mary’s in favor of couples staying together, but Mary might be like “Hmm … what this? A young woman who refers to Princess Leia as ‘Leia Organa’ and quotes from the one of the movies from the new trilogy that normal people stopped thinking about immediately after it ended? She seems like a fine match for Jared! All I have to do now is mention that his current girlfriend is freak-dancing with anyone who asks down at Rock It to speed this process along!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/12/22

Well, we sure were enjoying that storyline for a bit about a guy who wanted to be a superhero, which we think of as a noble pursuit, but then it turns out he was a crazy person, which maybe shouldn’t have been a surprise given the whole “wanted to be a superhero” thing. However, in addition to thinking that you can cure crime with surgery, the Street Sweeper also bought some extremely cheap handcuffs that may have just been part of a “hot cop” costume from Party City, so I think a lot of our philosophical questions are about to get resolved, at gunpoint.