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Mary Worth, 2/5/24

Say, remember way back at the beginning of this storyline, when Sonia showed up at Keith’s doorstep insisting that he was her father, and due to their shared hair color and love of root beer he just kind of went along with it, even though many of us were like “Um, Keith? DNA test? Hello??? DNA test????” Well, big news: he’s finally getting around to it, and sure, most of us would want to get confirmation of paternity before we went through the trouble of reconnecting (sexually) with our long-lost ex/supposed baby mama and scaring away the weird fake hippie dude who was always hanging around for reasons that seemed predatory but were never quite clear. But, let’s be clear: most of us are cowards. Anyway, can’t wait for Keith’s ol’ pal Sal to call him from the lab and say “Yeah, your instincts were right on. This was definitely root beer.”

Hi and Lois, 2/5/24

The joke here is obviously that Lois is at the end of her rope and has resorted to the flimsiest of pretenses to force her children to stop talking, but I’d like to believe that it’s Hi she’s addressing in the second panel. It’s his moment of silence because he’s dying, which she hasn’t told him about yet.

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Blondie, 2/4/24

I am of course more than happy to call Blondie wildly out of touch, culturally. But I gotta say, I trust this strip implicitly when it comes to the weird, terrible little games that old people play on Facebook that I only know about from their truly off-putting ads and that I assume somehow put recurring charges on your credit card that are very, very difficult to stop. To me, strips like today’s contain valuable ethnographical information and I am grateful for it.

Mark Trail, 2/4/24

OK, two questions here. One: why are we calling the shots we are giving to the horses a “fertility-control vaccine” instead of a “contraceptive shot”? We already have a perfectly good word in English for a medical intervention that prevents pregnancy, and it’s “contraceptive”! Two: why are they giving two-year doses of contraceptives fertility-control vaccines to, presumably, the female horses, when it’d probably be just as easy if not easier to permanently sterilize the male ones? Is this a plot by Big Horse Roundup to get easy government contracts every two years? FOLLOW THE MONEY, PEOPLE

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Hagar the Horrible, 2/3/24

Man, I remember when poetry was orally transmitted, when anyone could get in front of the assembly and fire off some verses that they had memorized about the contention of the gods or the glorious battles fought by our fathers or our fathers’ fathers in the south. But then, our fathers fathers’ brought back writing from the south, along with big ideas about how the King shouldn’t just be the chief of chiefs but at the top of the heap and in command of all, and now you need his permission just to be a poet, and you have to write all your poetry down on paper. This place is getting to be a drag, man. You wanna go to Greenland? I hear Greenland is still cool. Got a lot of breathing room out there.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/3/24

I applaud today’s Snuffy Smith for acknowledging that generation gap discourse is eternal and ongoing rather than doing the “kids today would rather look at the phone on their comfortable couch instead of playing kick the can in the street and getting run over by a car” bit, but I do want to recognize that Snuffy’s father was canonically in a Rip Van Winkle-style state of suspended animation for decades. He literally doesn’t understand the current generation! He’s a man out of time, unmoored from the world he thought he knew!

Hi and Lois, 2/3/24

Ha ha, it’s funny because Thirsty is going to die of carbon monoxide poisoning in that tent! Don’t worry, it will be very peaceful for him, because he’s quite drunk.