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Beetle Bailey, 11/17/21

Miss Buxley’s face isn’t what you would call “expressive” — it’s more what I would call “blowup sex doll” — but given that she’s juggling multiple devices to fulfill her work duties while her boss, who has given her all these duties, waxes nostalgic about the good old days, I do think her expression is successfully conveying the correct sentiment in panel two, which is “MURDER MUDER MURDER”.

Dick Tracy, 11/17/21

Given that the Apparatus is led by a guy who wears a full-body gimp suit just to hang around the office and staffed by people like Doubleup, a dude with Dagwood Bumstead hair who carries a bullwhip around at all times, it’s extremely hilarious to me that they just have a regular-ass receptionist named “Joanne” out at the front desk fielding calls. I assume she sort of knows she’s taking messages about murders and such but in the grand scheme of things she’s not paid enough to care about it, you know?

Pluggers, 11/17/21

The periods at the end of the sentences here really make this one grim. “Oh hey,” the dog-man says, without emotion. “A wheat penny from 1955. Huh.” There’s no joy or excitement in this realization. He’s not even sure why he checks anymore, really. Finding a wheat penny is just another thing that happens to him, from a long list of things that have happened to him, a list that is rapidly accelerating towards its conclusion.

Blondie, 11/17/21

Sorry, I don’t buy this “eBay” business at all. We all know Elmo is a crypto guy, and he would absolutely be trying to sell Dagwood an NFT of his little bird, which would be a much more lucrative scam.

Crankshaft, 11/17/21

“I mean, it would look terrible, but whatever! It’s your video! You asked me for help, do you what you want, see if I care.”

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Funky Winkerbean, 11/16/21

Remember how after the big post-Lisa’s-death Funky Winkerbean time jump, all the promotional material around the strip said it was going to push its aging cast into the background and focus more on a whole new set of teen characters to get back to its roots as a high school trip? Well, that very obviously never happened, possibly because it turns out that the average age of a newspaper comics reader is well within the range of Social Security eligibility, a group that intensely hates and fears teens. To cater to that demographic, the strip appears to be paying more and more attention to the generation older than the original cast. Like Funky’s dad, for instance! You remember him, right? His whole deal is that he’s enfeebled to the extent that Funky put him in a home, but he’s also very horny? This church choir story just took a turn, is what I’m saying, a horny, horny turn.

Dustin, 11/16/21

You ever wonder if Dustin’s family gets so sick of Dustin’s dad that they just tell him he has to leave and be insufferable at someone else for a few hours? Well, turns out they do, I’m pleased to report!

Beetle Bailey, 11/16/21

Remember earlier this year, when we learned that in addition to being an amiable moron, Zero is a terrifyingly efficient killing machine? Well, today we find out that he thinks shooting someone in the head is what sex is! Ha ha, look how satisfied he looks in panel two.

Gil Thorp, 11/16/21

How “enh” has this fall’s Gil Thorp plot been? We’ve finally got to the big twist, and it’s that … Tevin has been receiving qualified care from a professional therapist, and that helped him more than YouTube hypnosis! You can tell the kids are as bored as we are because they’re just stone cold going nuts about it, or maybe just because someone is standing on a table. “Hold on, Karl,” says Coach Kaz says. “Someone using a piece of furniture for something other than its intended purpose? This is interesting!”

Mary Worth, 11/16/21

oh my god it worked Wilbur scared off Dr. Ed with his aggressive karaoke violence, I don’t know if I’m furious or very impressed

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The Lockhorns, 11/15/21

I’m really loving Leroy’s little bar cart here. You never know what room in the house you might be in when you abruptly need to theatrically pour yourself and a friend some hard liquor as you start griping about how much you hate your wife, so it’s good to be able to easily wheel your cocktail supplies from place to place.

Dennis the Menace, 11/15/21

“Get it, old man? What Christ was to you in your long-ago day, cable television is to me in this brave new world! TV is my lord and savior! Pretty menacing, eh? I could be obsessed with YouTube videos on my parents’ phones like a normal five-year-old, but instead I worship television that you pay $150 a month for and it comes on at a specific time of day, like I’m 55 and have never been ‘good with computers.’ That’s pretty menacing too, in its own way.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith and Gasoline Alley, 11/15/21

I’m not sure if there’s some kind of upcoming anniversary involving one or both of these absurdly long-running strips that has prompted them to simultaneously acknowledge one another, and I don’t care to do the research to find out. I choose to believe that this is just the equivalent of two people who are by far the oldest at a party clocking each other and giving one another a silent nod of acknowledgment. Anyway, it’s too bad Jughaid is unaware of Archie Comics’ Jughead Jones, himself a character who’s been around almost as long as the Hootin’ Holler cast of Snuffy Smith, because I’m sure a lot more people are familiar with him than they are with Sheezix, at least until Gasoline Alley finally gets a CW sitcom of its very own. On the other hand, Jughaid is lucky that he and his fellow Holler residents exist forever in an ageless comic-book time, unlike folks in Gasoline Alley, who are trapped in a hell where they age in real time but their strip will never be cancelled and they will never be allowed to die.

Hi and Lois and Hagar the Horrible, 11/15/21

Bowls of barf? Vikings tossing a severed pig’s head around, for fun? Looks like this is the week when Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC realized that nobody really cares what you put in the newspaper anymore, and they’re gonna run with it.