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Blondie, 10/30/23

I had a conversation with a friend the other day about those haunted houses you can go to at amusement parks and such for Halloween, and she drew a distinction that really stuck with me: some stuff you encounter at these things, like decor with skulls and bats and other goth business, is spooky, and other stuff, like people jumping out of the dark and grabbing you, is scary, and not everyone is into both! Anyway, what Blondie experienced — a couple weird cosplayers coming up with a series of ever-dumber Halloween puns — is spooky, whereas Dagwood’s day, in which he once again had to weigh his emotional health against his family’s finances when dealing with his abusive boss, is scary. Here to help!

Crock, 10/30/23

Big news! After 48 years of doing a dumb comics riff on P. C. Wren’s 1924 novel Beaut Geste, as of today Crock will start doing a dumb comics riff on Albert Camus’s 1947 novel The Plague.

Dennis the Menace, 10/30/23

Is it just me or does the perspective in this panel make Dennis look like he’s about seven feet tall, but with the bodily proportions of a child, making him a truly nightmarish figure? Anyway, if I could change one thing about him, it’d be that. I’d like him to be a normal size again.

Mary Worth, 10/30/23

“Ugh, it used to be we would have sex, but now it turns out that people you have sex with sometimes have opinions? That are different from yours??? What the heck!”

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Gasoline Alley, 10/26/23

I don’t usually get a chance to deploy my classics degree, but when I do, it’s usually to make a joke about the etymology of some word in the daily comics on this blog, which if you think about it is probably a better use of it than trying to trick undergraduates into enjoying Vergil or whatever. Anyway, meretrix is Latin for “prostitute,” and “meretricious” means, basically, “whorish,” or, metaphorically, something that looks attractive but has no value, which is not something people really say anymore, what with changing attitudes around sex work and sex work’s usefulness as a metaphor. It definitely does not mean and has never meant “loud,” so I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a joke about how this bear, despite his surprising ability to mimic human speech, does not have as full a command of English vocabulary as he believes, or if the Gasoline Alley brain trust simply decided to do a joke that was specifically about the meaning of the word “meretricious” but just assumed they knew the meaning of the word “meretricious” and didn’t bother to double-check.

Dick Tracy, 10/26/23

Speaking of vocabulary, I like the fact that Dick is meticulously writing down everything in this conversation that he doesn’t entirely follow (“Whitman little big books,” “guttersnipe level”) and will be looking them up later to find out if he was being insulted.

Mary Worth, 10/26/23

You know, if your long ago ex finally found out about the child of his that you had 20 years ago and never told him about because said child tracked him down and showed up on his doorstep, and then he tracked you down and made you go dinner with him, I’d think you’d be less … bored? I mean, this is an experience I’ll thankfully never have, so I guess I can’t tell Kitty how to live her life or conduct herself, but the vibe I’ve been getting from this dinner is that she doesn’t find this whole scenario particularly interesting. Anyway, probably she spent less time telling her daughter that Keith was a cop/Marine and dwelt more on the fun parts (that he was a rippling hunk of a man who she largely finds dull but who’s pretty good at sex).

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Shoe, 10/19/23

I’ve complained about this before, but Shoe has a long-established setting where the various bird characters get drunk and hit on one another, and it’s the fern bar, so seeing them drinking and smoking and flirting at Roz’s Diner in the middle of the day seems off to me. Since the primary audience for this strip, like all newspaper comic strips, is vaguely disgruntled baby boomers, it’s possible that this is supposed to be a commentary on the fact that everyone is “working” form home now and you can’t even enjoy a nice plate of meatloaf for lunch at your local greasy spoon without having to watch a bunch of kids who make “apps” for a living get drunk and try to have sex with each other, which is probably why they’re charging so much for the meatloaf these days. It’s also possible that the Shoe brain trust simply lost the image files for the fern bar background and they don’t feel like drawing it again.

Mary Worth, 10/19/23

I wonder if Keith is finding his ex using the same public data that led his secret daughter right to his apartment, or if he still has access to police databases that he’s wildly misusing? Either way, I’m not complaining, because it’s very funny seeing this guy with cartoonishly beefy forearms daintily typing away on a little Macbook.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/19/23

Welp, it seems our Mud/Rene kidnapping plot really did just kind of end in the middle of the week, which means we have a few days to spend on the Morgans’ incredibly boring family life, I guess? These kids sound like a real handful; they’re probably too young for the Mirakle Method, but if you stick a screen playing “Li’l Fergus” videos in front of them, they’ll be lulled into ignorable silence at least.

Beetle Bailey, 10/19/23

I think Beetle’s response here is kind of funny, as it’s fairly obvious that he’s sticking a pin in that doll and I assume Killer wants to know what he’s doing in a much bigger-picture sense. Anyway, I was going to do a whole riff about how it’s surprising that someone as lazy as Beetle was willing to put in the work to learn the cultural and spiritual practices of the voudou religion, but it turns out that so-called “voodoo dolls” aren’t used by practitioners of voudou in either Haiti or Louisiana, so I guess his laziness is still in full effect. I’m impressed that he somehow got a really accurate Sarge doll, though.