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Blondie, 10/30/20

Look, I’m on the record as saying that I don’t actually care that Blondie intermittently acknowledges the coronavirus pandemic, sometimes doing bits with Dagwood working at home but more often than not just ignoring the whole thing and having his white collar commuter life continue on as usual. And that’s fine, because Blondie takes place in a nebulously eternal present and has no continuous “storylines” so it doesn’t bother me even if they’re inconsistent about it day to day. But I refuse to accept an instance where DithersCo LLC’s work-at-home situation suddenly changes in mid-strip, especially when said strip is clearly not in March 2020, but rather sometime in late October.

Dick Tracy, 10/30/20

I’m honestly quite in favor of Dick Tracy lifting Little Orphan Annie and Brenda Starr from their cancelled strips, dropping them into its plotlines, and essentially turning itself into the Tribute Content Agency Cinematic Universe. Now, do I support the implication of the odd silent final panel here — that the beloved Annie herself is a vampire, or at least vamp-curious? I guess I’m willing to wait and see exactly where this goes before weighing in.

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Dennis the Menace and Hi and Lois, 10/29/20

Truly, there’s nothing more menacing than a child who becomes extremely aware of their own ability to perform a sort of exaggerated pantomime of childhood antics. Look at Dennis’s sickeningly smug facial expression in panel two — it’s like he didn’t ruin the wall for the joy of it, but rather just so he could unleash this sub-Family Circusism on his poor mother. Dot, too, is really overdoing it; a child rejoicing in the suffering of a sibling is demonstrating a distasteful but natural human emotion, but she’s making such a big deal of her cruel mirth that it’s clearly meant for an audience, one that for the moment is withholding the attention she so obviously and pathetically craves.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/29/20

Snuffy’s facial expression similarly seems wildly overdone, but I think we’re supposed to read it as genuine. See, he’s really depressed because he’s so poor and so deep in debt that he can’t afford to buy anything to eat, which is … the punchline to this strip, I guess?

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Dick Tracy, 10/28/20

Dick Tracy doesn’t gruesomely murder its villains like it used to, but I have to admire how efficiently this plot has wrapped up: Professor Stokes swooped acrobatically away from Dick and Liz, only to immediately be turned into hamburger by a cop car that was on its way to deal with an unrelated and presumably more normal crime. I like the focus on Dick dropping shattered remnants of the artificial fang apparatus into the evidence bag, just to remind us that, hey, you know who wouldn’t have died after getting run over by a car? A real vampire.

Mary Worth, 10/28/20

I gotta say, if your girlfriend saw you talking to a friend while he was waving a crack pipe in your face but you never actually ended up smoking crack with him, you should probably immediately tell her exactly what you did or didn’t do when she confronts you about it — or maybe even before! — rather than just saying vague, fake-sounding stuff like “It wasn’t what it looked like!” On the other hand, if you’re going to sassily tell your boyfriend that he needs to “tell it to the hand,” you need to shove the palm of said hand at his face, not just wave it around vaguely in his general direction. There’s plenty of blame to go around here, is what I’m trying to say.

Family Circus, 10/28/20

Yeah, Billy, the fundamental laws of mathematics that underlie the very fabric of our reality do in fact remain constant, sorry you find that so boring