Post Content

Beetle Bailey, 5/10/24

The thing I like about this strip is how numb Sarge looks in the second panel. He scarfed down two plates full of burgers and fries and guzzled two waters in just a few minutes, and for what? Does he feel any better? Does he feel sated? Will he ever feel sated? He didn’t even wash his hands. He ate dinner with dirty hands, and he didn’t even enjoy it.

Mary Worth, 5/10/24

Seeing a disheveled Wilbur gesticulating with a sandwich and talking about “turning off the world” is genuinely chilling. Did he use his Wilbur-Man powers to transform the whole universe outside of his apartment into an endless void? Hopefully his abilities allow him to create as well as destroy, or that’s the last sandwich he’ll ever eat. Eternal peace … but at what cost?

Blondie, 5/10/24

Somebody in the Blondie supply chain has been having real fun with bold and chunky color gradients lately, and I just want to say: I see you, and I appreciate you.

Post Content

Mary Worth, 5/9/24

Dawn is reconnecting with her Connecticut WASP mother by attempting to enjoy high-prestige social pursuits like the ballet. Wilbur, meanwhile, has reacted to his brutal romantic rejection by descending into unkempt couch-based schlubdom. This is an experience Dawn knows a little bit about herself, so no matter how annoying she finds her mother’s culturally elitist suburban clique, she should be thankful she’s not being pulled back into that morass.

Hagar the Horrible, 5/9/24

It’s sad, of course, that Helga has no friends she can confide in. But thanks to her husband’s canonical illiteracy, she can confide in her books to her heart’s content. It’s like being able to scream in a language he doesn’t speak, constantly!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/9/24

Rex Morgan is about to face his most terrifying medical challenge yet: his family’s emotions, which he’s apparently supposed to care about. Remember that crazy guy who wanted Rex to do a little experimental brain surgery on someone in an attempt to “cure crime“? He refused then, but now seems to be contemplating whether he could “cure feelings that require attention from me” using nothing but his trusty power drill.

Post Content

Tina’s Groove, 5/8/24

So Tina’s Groove is one of the “new” comics I’ve been reading lately, though in the interest of total accuracy I should note that these strips aren’t new at all, seeing as Tina’s Groove stopped publishing in 2017 and a cursory glance at the copyright date would reveal that this strip in particular is 15 years old. But who cares! I still hate on Crock despite it being in perpetual reruns, because the people want my opinions [note to self: double-check on this] and anyway, the origin of this site was me making fun of whatever happened to be in the paper’s comics section that day, and now we’re just letting “King Features’ Comics Kingdom website” stand in for “the paper” in a transition that definitely explains why the economics of journalism are in total freefall.

Anyway, a fun thing about these older strips is seeing that even in fairly recent history some terms we take for granted had not quite gelled. Was there really a time, when this blog was already a going concern making jokes about how Dr. Jeff’s daughter accidentally fell for a bigamist, when people were calling fist bumps “knuckle bumping”? Or was Tina’s Groove just extremely unhip? I’ll just say that it could’ve gone worse.

Gasoline Alley,5/8/24

Speaking of linguistic evolution and being extremely unhip, has there ever been a worse rebranding in history than Twitter becoming “X”? This is a name that literally nobody uses in real life, and I speak as someone hopelessly addicted to the site (they briefly banned me for no reason I could ever establish, then decided that the harshest punishment they could give me was to let me back on). Basically the only people who ever use the “real” name are publications that feel like they have to and people trying to ingratiate themselves with Elon Musk. I honestly feel like getting Gasoline Alley to use it is a real coup, and I think they could’ve dispensed with the “formerly known as Twitter” bit because it’s not like the strip readership has ever heard of it. They already started panicking when they read the word “internet”!