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Dennis the Menace, 4/8/21

I’ve always thought Dennis’s affinity for Westerns, a genre very popular among children when this strip began and almost unknown to children today, says a lot about the suffocating layer of nostalgia piled atop this strip. However, today we get an intriguing hint that Dennis is actually watching revisionist neo-Westerns that try to grapple with the real social and historical backgrounds behind the myths, and whose heroes, turning to liquor in a futile attempt to numb the loneliness of the open range and the trauma of living in a violent frontier society, end up suffering from alcohol-induced psychosis — or, in cowboy patois, “scotch terrors.”

Blondie, 4/8/21

If DithersCo employs a full-time vending machine stocker rather than just hiring a service that stocks the machines for multiple businesses in the area like everyone else does, maybe Mr. Dithers ought to spend less time micromanaging Dagwood while he’s at work and more time thinking about some of their structural staffing costs. On the other hand, this arrangment may have arisen because there’s a single employee who’s responsible for the company’s unusually intense vending machine use, and replacing him with someone of similar talents but a lesser appetite will produce some real benefits for DithersCo’s bottom line.

Dick Tracy, 4/8/21

Say what you will about Dick Tracy, but if you want to see a guy in a suit stabbing a hippie in major newspapers, this comic strip is your only option.

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Daddy Daze, 4/7/21

A thing that irritates me and probably nobody else in storytelling is when the protagonist has to solve some central mystery and for most of the book/TV show/movie/whatever they’re the point-of-view character, with the audience learning new information when and how the protagonist learns it, but suddenly and abruptly we get a shift in perspective and see a scene that reveals vital information that the protagonist isn’t privy to! I complained about this online years ago in regards to North By Northwest, and I’ve noticed it recently in A Simple Favor and The Flight Attendant — all of which I enjoyed, to be clear, but I still find this specific aspect annoying!

Anyway, this isn’t quite the same thing, but to the extent that I enjoy the comic strip Daddy Daze, I enjoy it in terms of its own central mystery: do the Daddy Daze daddy and the Daddy Daze baby truly communicate in a secret language of bas, or is the daddy just in the throes of late-stage single parenting psychosis? Frankly, a strip in which the baby apparently successfully holds a conversation with his grandmother undermines that ambiguity. On the other hand, it’s possible that the baby just mashed his finger on the phone and babbled nonsense at it, and the daddy has once again made up an elaborate narrative to make sense out of this moment and his life that includes no interaction with adults for days at a time. His mother is none the wiser that any of this is going on in this scenario, and is no doubt better off for it.

Gil Thorp, 4/7/21

Meanwhile, in Gil Thorp, a guy had to go to the public library to use their computers, and had the same thought we all do whenever we go to a public library, which is “this library has too much money!” Words cannot describe how much more excited I am about a library drama storyline in Gil Thorp than a storyline about, like, sports, which no doubt tells you exactly what I think of Abel Brito’s dumb opinions.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/6/21

Sarah may have forgotten all her magical art skills due to her amnesia, but at least she still has the vague notion that artists use paint and brushes in their day-to-day work. Despite being a doctor’s daughter, the quotidian details of medicine are apparently unfamiliar to her. Doctors punch people, right? That’s how they get them to stop complaining about their various ailments? By knocking them unconscious with a fist to the jaw?

Mark Trail, 4/6/21

Over in Mark Trail, Mark’s offhand remark to Rusty that “crickets are land shrimp” went viral on Rusty’s TikTok BikBok, and so he’s flown to LA to do a hip-hop video with Reptiliannaire, a reptile-themed rapper. However, because I know a lot of people read Mark Trail for accurate information about flora and fauna, I find today’s strip irresponsible: I can assure you that you are not likely to step out of LAX and encounter an iguana in the backseat of the first car you enter in the “California reality.” (You will instead get into a Lyft that smells like weed.)

Mary Worth, 4/6/21

Hey, remember when Saul first showed up in Charterstone, and he was a rude jerk to everyone, and then then his dog died, and he was emotionally devastated, and also it turned out that many years ago his family forced him to give up his true love in order to marry someone else, and he literally fled in terror when Mary tried to get him to talk about his feelings, so eventually she just forced him to adopt a dog against his will? Well, he’s never been to therapy! What could he possibly gain from it? It’s for girls, mostly.

Blondie, 4/6/21

You ever look at some particularly weird character design choice in a legacy comic and think to yourself, “Enh, that’s just the ossified memory of some decades-old artistic style that sort of made sense in a former aesthetic and is too closely tied to the character to ditch now, it’s probably not worth thinking about.” Well, I regret to inform you that those design choices are very real and literal in the universe of the strip, and they make other characters in the strip horny. They are absolutely a sex thing. Huge apologies for breaking this to you like this, but I don’t believe in letting my readers live in a world of comforting lies.

Pluggers, 4/6/21

“Oh well,” you’re probably thinking after that one, “at least I don’t know much about pluggers’ peeing and pooping situation.” Well, I’ve got bad news on that front too.