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Hi and Lois, 12/8/21

I’m reasonably sure we’ve never actually seen Trixie walking before? It’s 100% appropriate that this is the context in which she takes her first steps: just left alone in the middle of floor, with her parents nowhere to be seen and possibly not even in the house.

Crankshaft, 12/8/21

Man, wouldn’t it be great if this is how we found out that Crankshaft died? “Hey, we realized that your father hasn’t been a huge inconvenience and waste of first responder time and energy this year. Is something up with him?” “Oh, yeah, he died.” [starting tomorrow a tire ad is run in this spot on the comics page]

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/7/21

So Nancy finally got herself motivated to put an evil scheme in motion, for certain limited definitions of “evil” and “scheme,” and decided to blow Sarah’s cover about the whole Kitty Cop pseudonym thing, and because there are no murders or political corruption or even fun car chases in the Morgans’ boring burg, the local news is camped out on their front steps demanding an interview. Just in time for Niki to show up with tonight’s dinner! These days, Niki is merely yet another bland teen character in Rex Morgan, M.D., but you might recall that he arrived in the strip as a petty thief who stole June’s purse. Eventually, of course, he was brought to the side of boring goodness when Rex took him on a wholesome, manly fishing vacation. Anyway, I have vague memories that among Nancy’s other crimes, she at one point tried to steal Niki away from Kelly (who also used to be a bajillion times more interesting than she is now), so it would be fun if Niki had gone back to the dark side and is wearing a wire so that he can sneak in to the Morgan house and get an interview with Sarah that will make Nancy rich and the Morgans embarrassed, but “fun” is the one thing this strip doesn’t do so it definitely won’t happen.

Dennis the Menace, 12/7/21

Not sure what’s more unsettling: that Mr. Wilson might be planning to make a crude mannequin out of cast-off objects he has lying around the house, label it “my sanity,” and start ostentatiously making out with it whenever Dennis is around, or the fact that the holiday season means that Dennis will be spending even less time with his family than usual.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/7/21

Hootin’ Holler! It’s a lawless place where you can experience vicious and arbitrary violence at any time thanks to a generations-old clan feud whose origins are long forgotten and a place where they don’t have fancy high-tech gizmos like “doorknobs”!

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Crankshaft, 12/6/21

Look, it’s not that I want to be a comics curmudgeon, all the time; sometimes it’s just important to me that comics do a better job of really zeroing in on the ideas they have instead of just running with the first iteration of a gag they come up with. So, like, with “Crankshaft is befuddled and angered by the modern world”: the thing where Ed’s favorite gardening catalog and then went out of business but got bought out by a blog or something is dumb and I don’t care for it. But Ed getting conned by a nootropics snake oil scam, which he presumably got wind of from a Facebook ad or an email forward, is definitely something I can get behind.

Blondie, 12/6/21

I think of Dagwood and Blondie as “old people,” to go along with the title of this post, because they were adults when I was a kid, but I guess they’re actually not old at all. They’re probably younger than I am now! Ha ha! Oh, life is so short and so fleeting! Anyway, if you’ve ever wondered what sort of sex stuff these two are into, it turns out it’s somehow both more banal and more distasteful than you could’ve imagined.