Post Content

Mary Worth, 10/4/24

Look, Stell, you’re clearly a vibrant, attractive woman with an active romantic and sexual life. Nevertheless, you’re a woman of a certain age, with “certain” meaning “not young,” as evidenced by the fact that you fell for an extremely common elder scam not that long ago. There’s nothing wrong with being on the older side, of course, but it’s important to have some self-awareness and not try to deploy unfamiliar youth slang, OK? Take “ghosted,” for instance: this describes a situation where you’re seeing someone with various possible degrees of seriousness, or are at least gearing up to do so, but then they abruptly cut off contact with you and stop replying to your texts/emails/DMs/other communication attempts. It very much does not describe a situation where your fiance cancels on you for a social event at the last minute, but does so by sending you a text at the time explaining why he’s doing it. You used the word wrong and that’s just how it is! Mary doesn’t know any better, but the youth of today do, so please choose your words more carefully next time in case they overhear you. We would’ve allowed the use of “ghosting” in this context if Ed had died (for instance, by doing emergency surgery on a corgi while exhausted and accidentally slicing his femoral artery with the scalpel and bleeding out on the floor of his own clinic) and, desperate to still make the engagement dinner, he showed up as a ghost. That’s not the usual use of the term but I don’t think anyone would’ve given you trouble. But he didn’t do that either, he did the first thing I said (didn’t show up but explained why and then you saw him not long afterwards, which is also antithetical to the whole “ghosting” concept).

Dennis the Menace, 10/4/24

Ha ha, it’s funny because Mrs. Wilson is admitting the sad truth: she and George are just going through the motions, living but going no further, not experiencing the style and verve that make life worth living. It’s like it only took a few minutes of respite from Dennis’s low-key menacing for them to look the true existential menace square in the face.

Post Content

Gearhead Gertie, 10/3/24

Now, I might be an Ivy League-educated coastal elitist, but the Ivy League school I attended was in fact located in the Finger Lakes, and I know that they’ll just let any schmo drive on at least one NASCAR track, so I assume this is probably true elsewhere? Not going to bother researching that, I’m just saying, this panel is predicated on the idea that Gertie is doing something crazy when in fact she’s doing something very normal for a NASCAR obsessive such as herself. I don’t usually take sides in comic strip marital spats but her husband needs to chill out!

Blondie, 10/3/24

Blondie is a strip I very much never think of as “visually interesting,” so I do have to give props to Dagwood’s thought balloon in the first panel, which wraps around the door to match his imagined sausage garland placement. On the other hand, his wink is pure nightmare fuel, and the idea of “pizza-shaped pillows” … that’s just round! That’s not epic at all! Look, Alexander, there’s a pizza-shaped pillow on the couch right next to you!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/3/24

You know, if Mud Mountain only pretended to be the first guy in history who ever had his personality genuinely improved after joining an obviously fake scam self-help cult, just so he could lull Truck into complacency and get an invitation to perform together again, at which point he plans to pull off his patented move — pretending to shit his pants on stage — well, I for one will have no choice but to respect it.

Post Content

Beetle Bailey, 10/2/24

Hello, faithful readers! You might recall that last week I opined that Beetle Bailey had abandoned the spirit, though not the letter, of Miss Buxley Wednesday by producing technically Buxley-inclusive content that nobody could possibly be aroused by. Well, it seems that the bigwigs at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC have listened to my reasoned critique and delivered two panels of Miss Buxley in all her miniskirted glory. Sure, she’s as crudely drawn as ever, but she’s waving her arms around frantically and yelling right next to a laser printer that’s going crazy and spewing out paper, and I’m reasonably sure that a sizable minority of you could talk yourselves into getting off to that, if you really put in the work.

Pluggers, 10/2/24

I had always assumed that actual short-order cooks are plugger short-order cooks? I mean, I guess I haven’t been keeping tabs on the hierarchies, but do you mean to tell me that this underpaid, manually demanding profession is coastal elitist-coded now? That real pluggers are at home seething with class resentment at short-order cooks because they use fancy stoves to cook? By god, pluggers just eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and they like it! They don’t even toast the bread! Do you toast the bread, like some kind of communist? I’d blame Hulu’s hit show The Bear for this change in attitude, as it shows short-order cooks having aspirations beyond their station, but (a) no plugger subscribes to a “streaming service” and (b) if they did, as horrible man-animal chimeras, their primary reaction to the show would be confusion that nobody on it is actually a bear.