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Family Circus, 10/27/20

I am extremely tickled that Dolly is standing on a stool in order to deliver this joke. I assume it’s a practical cartooning matter — if she were on the floor, she’d be cropped out by the circular border of the panel — but I’d like to imagine that she laboriously dragged the stool in in from the other room and climbed up on it so she could really get in her mother’s face with her latest nonsense, with Ma Keane refusing to make eye contact with her or acknowledge her in any way all the while.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/27/20

So it turns out the bad thing Sarah did was … that she gave her self a haircut, and not even in a comical or interesting way, and June was able to fix it without too much trouble, and even if she couldn’t, Sarah is like eight years old and does everything by Zoom right now, so who cares if her hair looks a little funny, you know? But that isn’t going to stop us from debriefing about it for days, and it won’t stop Rex — who, remember, is working in a COVID ward and the current strips are taking place in the initial wave of the pandemic so presumably he’s watching multiple people die daily despite his best medical efforts — from treating this as the biggest disappointment he’s encountered in his life to date. Rex says that he would’ve never thought to cut his own hair as a child, and it definitely tracks that he was boring as shit from the minute he was born.

Mark Trail, 10/27/20

Oh, huh, I see that Happy Trail Farms really is where various Mark clones are spawned using forbidden science, exactly as I predicted. Maybe we need to have a Crisis on Infinite Trails, with DoddTrail, ElrodTrail, and AllenTrail vanquished in combat, before RiveraTrail can thrive, to the extent that freelance writing in the clickbait era can be called “thriving.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/27/20

Ha ha, it’s funny because Hootin’ Holler is so impoverished and isolated that it cannot participate in the modern economy, which is built around the mass manufacturing of complex devices out of standardized and interchangeable components!

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Six Chix, 10/26/20

Look, I know it’s “spooky season” or whatever but I honestly did not want to spend a lot of my day thinking about how ghosts interact with physical matter, ok? Like, we all know they can pass through solid walls at will, but also apparently lounge on furniture if they want. But what’s their relationship with gasses like? Do they have the ability to detect vibrations in the air and process them as sound, the way we do? When they “talk” to one another, are they doing it via audible noise or direct mind-to-mind (soul-to-soul?) communication, and thus maybe the “ears” in this statement are metaphorical, or a memory of what it was like to have a physical body, who knows how many centuries ago? Anyway, I’m not sure if I’d be obsessing about this less if any of these ghosts had visible earholes or anything, but I would’ve liked to have found out.

Dick Tracy, 10/26/20

There’s a been a lot of hilarity in this weird Dick Tracy vampire storyline, but the fact that Professor Stokes is swinging off the roof on a JAZZ FEST banner is the absolute funniest thing we’ve seen in this strip in a long time. I can’t quite explain why I’m sure a biology professor who’s into extremely chintzy mechanically-assisted vampirism would also be very into jazz, but I’m very sure that he would be. Professor Stokes is probably sad that his artificial bat wing apparatus is still in the prototype stage at the moment, but if he can’t fly away, at least he can make his escape with an assist from his beloved jazz fest.

Dustin, 10/26/20

God, I love that Dustin’s dad is absolutely seething in the second panel. He went through all this trouble of buying a big suburban house, just like society says he was supposed to, and now he finds out he has to maintain it, just like he has to maintain his failing body? This is bullshit. Bullshit.

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Funky Winkerbean, 10/25/20

OK, so, just to make sure we have the sequence clear, these ICE dudes arrested Adeela (who, just to emphasize, is in the United States legally) due to a bureaucratic fuckup (one that didn’t make a ton of narrative sense, but still), fast-tracked her for near-immediate deportation, resisted any attempt by her lawyer to make them re-examine the dodgy evidence that led them to their decision, and released her not because they realized they were wrong or because they reassessed their obviously broken internal processes, but because of political intervention at the highest levels. But anyway, they’re returning the Montoni’s bag, so they’re good now! No hard feelings, right? [Backslapping and laughter all around]

Daddy Daze, 10/25/20

Wow, the Daddy Daze daddy’s goth friend sure is getting extra goth today, isn’t he, moaning about how parenting makes time stretch on infinitely, such that we’re all either rapidly aging or cursed with eternal life or maybe both. Anyway, it absolutely makes sense that the Daddy Daze daddy has chosen to sit several seats away from him.

Blondie, 10/25/20

Not to brag or anything, but if I wanted to spend an evening out with a pal and possibly get home long after my wife went to sleep, I would just tell her that’s what I had planned, and if that made her uncomfortable in some way, we’d have an open and honest discussion about it. Maybe that’s weird, maybe the rest of you are all promising your spouses you’ll be home by 1 am and coming home at 3 am and getting in trouble for it, I dunno, but you know what’s a hell of a lot weirder? Dagwood thinking that only wearing his undershirt makes him quieter, somehow.

Baby Blues, 10/25/20

It’s also never occurred to me to casually ask my wife “Hey, babe, you ever fuck Spider-Man?” so maybe I just need to admit that everyone’s marriage is unique and none of us have any real idea what anybody else is doing.