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Funky Winkerbean, 5/27/19

Oh, hey, remember how Cindy decided her next big project should be a documentary about silent movie legend Butter Brinkel, who I guess is supposed to be a thinly veiled Fatty Arbuckle, which is definitely a subject the youth-obsessed audience at Buddyblog will be into? To track down the “real story” on this disgraced movie star, she’s talking to Cliff Anger, former HUAC Blacklistee and the subject of her last documentary, which was nominated for an Emmy, thank you very much. Since Cliff was in the Merchant Marine and/or the Communist Party USA as of 1940, that puts him in his late 90s today, at minimum; but since Arbuckle’s big scandal happened in 1921, that still makes Cliff too young to have known him at the height of his career. But I guess in a world where the Brown Derby continues to be a going concern decades after the last one went out of business in real life, we can’t expect the flow of history to match up with reality as we know it. Anyway, I’m hoping “he was my kemosabe” is coded silent era slang for gay stuff, but it’s probably just a reference to a wildly racist costume Cindy is going to find photo evidence of soon enough.

Hi and Lois, 5/27/19

Not sure if we’re meant to read Lois’s statement in panel two as “I feel bad for Thirsty and am not going to go along with Hi in freezing him out” or “I actually find Hi’s cooking unappetizing and can barely scarf down half of one of his burgers, so why let it go to waste” or “I’ve been ‘sharing’ my ‘burger’ with Thirsty for a while now so I suppose it’s time all the men in my life were updated on the situation,” but I appreciate the way the kids are staring at the adults gobsmacked, waiting for the drama to fully reveal its details.

Slylock Fox, 5/27/19

Count Weirdly has blown it again, but you have to give him credit: “Oh, he was just here, because, uh, the ice cubes are still in his drink,” is exactly the sort of bullshit Sly thinks is like DNA-level case-solving evidence.

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Blondie, 5/26/19

Longtime joshreads dot com trufans know that one of my obsessions about the comic strip Blondie is that Dagwood and Blondie and their teenage children live in a house that, as near we can tell, doesn’t have a shower. We see the inside of their bathroom repeatedly (some might say too often for comfort), and we’ve never seen a shower head or shower curtain. We know that Dagwood prefers baths himself, but it seems bizarre for him to impose his lifestyle choices on his family, especially considering that adding a shower head wouldn’t prevent him from bathing in his preferred manner.

Anyway, today we learn that there is a second bathroom somewhere in the Bumstead residence! Is this where non-Dagwood family members shower, like normal people? And where is this other bathroom? We know that the tub-bathroom where today’s action takes place is on the second floor. Is the tub-bathroom a master bath? Is the more typical bathroom usually the one the kids used, but Blondie has had enough and finally just wants to take a shower today, god damn it? I’ll return to this topic once I finish my elaborate digital 3D model of the Bumstead house, which will rival the diagrams of the Overlook Hotel that the Kubrick obsessives of Room 237 came up with.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/26/19

Good news, everyone! Any sense of dramatic tension that might’ve been created by this robbery has been dissipated in just four days, which has to be some kind of record. And the big resolution also reveals that nobody was ever in the slightest danger this whole time! What a relief!

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Hi and Lois, 5/25/19

The best part about today’s strip is the expressions of pure delight on Ditto and his friend’s faces in panel two. This clearly isn’t the first time Thirsty has overshared the contours of marital woes with them, but now things have escalated to the point where he’s been thrown out of the house, and so they’re settling in for some tales of truly outrageous tales of domestic depravity.

Beetle Bailey, 5/25/19

Fun fact! “Knasen,” which, depending on which possibly incorrect auto-translation service you use, is Swedish either for “knees” or “the knot,” is what Beetle Bailey is called in Sweden. And since we all know that Swedish Beetle Bailey is just straight-up porn, that means that Plato has been spending his off hours getting aroused reading about the adventures of Scandinavian alternate universe versions of him and his friends, who get to actually have sex.

Not fun at all fact! Sarge often viciously beats up Beetle in public for the slightest irritation, and nobody ever stops him.

Dustin, 5/25/19

Hey kids, remember Dustin, the comic that doesn’t really know what Twitter is or how it works? Well, here’s some exciting news: it has even less of a grasp on Instagram.