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Hi and Lois, 7/30/21

“Gosh, I wish there were continuing storylines in Hi and Lois,” said … someone? One of you, maybe? Well, here you go, it turns out that one of the defining features of Chip’s teenage years is the conflict between spending time with pretty blondes or redheads and spending time mowing the yard in order to earn money to subsidize the spending associated with the aforementioned time with girls. Riveting stuff from America’s funny pages!

Gil Thorp, 7/30/21

This summer’s Gil Thorp is doing a fascinating experiment: can it weave a plotline out of golf jargon that is 100% opaque to me, a non-golf-fan, and still keep me, a Gil Thorp superfan, involved? I’m gonna hold on for dear life and see what happens! The closest analogue to reading this that I can think of is when I’m watching something on TV that’s in a foreign language with subtitles, and I absent-mindedly start looking at something on my phone and realize I haven’t understood anything anyone’s said for the past minute or two but have been kind of following along just based on the emotional cadence of people’s voices. Today’s panel two is putting an additional degree of difficulty in place by having the golf-jargon-speaker block a big chunk of his face with his hand so I can’t tell if he’s smiling or frowning or what, but I’m up to the challenge!

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 7/29/21

So, Grimm, who is a dog, got his owner/”mom” a “gift,” but the joke is he’s too cheap to actually get her an engraved champagne bucket (?) and instead he stole one (???) from the Sheraton in Chicago, a fairly nice hotel where he somehow managed to stay, despite being a dog, and also cheap? Interesting. Interesting.

Shoe, 7/29/21

The Pefesser, who I have always assumed to be in late middle age at the youngest (not that it’s easy to tell when you’re dealing with a bird-man) is often seen using a crate as a chair. Speaking as an early as a mid-middle-aged man myself, I can say with some confidence that this would be terrible for your back! There’s something particularly grim about it here, as the Perfesser puts the finishing touches on his presumably unsellable book, in what appears to be his large and almost entirely unfurnished attic.

Dennis the Menace, 7/29/21

Dennis the Menace appears to have taken a tiny step forward into the modern age by depicting Alice engaging in the near-universal 2020s pastime of simultaneously watching TV and playing around on her phone. Of course, she’s still in a world where her husband is wearing a checkered sports coat while relaxing at home, so let’s not get too excited just yet.

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The Phantom, 7/28/21

Given how completely superhero franchises have come to dominate pop culture, it’s kind of amazing to think about how relatively recent they are as a concept! For instance, the Phantom, who was created in 1936 — recently enough that he’s not even in the public domain! — is considered the transitional figure between superheroes and the pulp heroes of the previous generation; he was the first such heroic figure to wear the now-standard skintight costume, and the first wear a mask that somehow renders his pupils invisible. My point is that he’s important historically, and is both of our time and of the past, and it may sound old-fashioned when he starts quips with “To whom it may concern,” but that’s just how a generation much more accustomed to writing formal letters talked, okay?

Beetle Bailey, 7/28/21

Folks, it’s come to our attention that certain newspaper comic strips are getting unpleasantly horny. Well, at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC, we’re working hard to combat that trend, by establishing that all of our characters are terrified of sexual arousal, and also are possibly under 13 years year old. You’re welcome, America!

Mary Worth, 7/28/21

Speaking of removing any temptations to horniness, it looks like Ashlee’s big epiphany wasn’t that Drew is a kindhearted person who she could treat as a real partner, not just a mark, but that Drew is a kindhearted person who a strumpet like her doesn’t deserve. So she’s just going to slink off into the sunset, leaving Drew to find the sort of nice upper-class girl that he should be paired with Shauna, I guess?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/28/21

“That would be charming and funny in comic strip form, wouldn’t it? Those are definitely qualities you wouldn’t see here, so I’m just going to stare out at the readers all slack-jawed.”