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Tina’s Groove, 8/1/24

I’m honestly really starting to enjoy the 15-years-ago-ness of the Tina’s Groove strips offered up daily by the King Features website; for me, that lands in a nostalgic sweet spot that feels much more dated than Crock reruns from the ’90s or whatever. Like, remember the ’00s, when the only thing that could send a text message was a BlackBerry, and if you wanted to send such a message, you would ask your companion politely first? Of course you don’t, because that’s not really how it worked, but I suppose it might be how someone who’d never actually interacted with a BlackBerry user might think it worked.

Anyway, this strip obviously has a more timeless element to it, which is that Tina seems to have gone on a date (?) with a guy who she thought was Amish, but isn’t really. A good clue would’ve been his facial hair: mustaches were so strongly associated with soliders and militarism in early modern Germany that the pacifist Anabaptist sects that were the forerunners to today’s Amish and Mennonites foreswore them, leading to the distinctive chinbeard we associate with them today. Another way she could’ve guessed he wasn’t Amish is that he’s on date with her right now, since that’s pretty antithetical to their whole deal.

Mary Worth, 8/1/24

Don’t forget, Dr. Ed is an accomplished amateur pianist! I myself briefly forgot, and thought that maybe Estelle was doing an outwardly worshipful “Oh!” but an inwardly exasperated “Sigh!” because she actually was sick of his musical stylings, but no, that’s a worshipful “Sigh!” and her inner and outer selves are fully in alignment, which obviously makes for exciting conflict-free storytelling.

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Hi and Lois, 7/31/24

Trixie Flagston has, notoriously, been a baby for nearly 70 years, longer than most of us have been alive, and thought-balloons in complete sentences, so we think of her as having the mental capacity, knowledge, and experience of a much older child, or maybe even an adult. But if we are to take the narrative of the strip at face value, she is a baby, probably less than a year old, and we must therefore assume that she is constantly encountering new concepts and categories of object for the first time. Like today, for instance: she hears Ditto say “blocks” and assumes this castle will be made out of the stackable wooden cubes that she’s accustomed to smashing into and scattering with delight. Little does she know that these are new, unfamiliar Lego blocks, which will snap securely together, and which were possibly acquired by the twins specifically to protect their creations from their disruptive little sister! Surely that smug grin will be wiped off Trixie’s face when Dot or Ditto simply turns their castle back upright after Trixie’s attack, and a new a distressing fact about the world will settle into her mind.

Dick Tracy, 7/31/24

Hey, remember that guy who was being blackmailed over some salacious photos and was paying his mustachio’d blackmailer in cryptocurrency? Well, it turns out he owns a baseball team, or runs some other kind of “enterprise” for which he reports to the Commissioner of Baseball. Would that have made this storyline more interesting, if we had learned it earlier, before the MCU arrested all the bad guys? Maybe! But I guess we’ll never know, now.

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Mary Worth, 7/30/24

A recurring question that arises in the increasingly Wilbur-focused era of Mary Worth we find ourselves in is: are we getting so much Wilbur because we’re expected to like and support him, or are we being repeatedly shown his worst humiliations, in order to create a strip that is nothing more than his personal hell? I’ve had my doubts, but today’s strip, in which Wilbur tells an incredulous fish that he communicated with another dead fish in a dream, and then we smash cut to Wilbur’s ex, whom Wilbur named the dead fish after, in the midst of an extremely erotic canoodle with her handsome boyfriend, certainly seems to point in one direction fairly strongly.

Blondie, 7/30/24

Blondie absolutely loves a “what’s a universal, non-controversial cultural touchstone of the moment we can do extremely lazy jokes about,” and obviously the Olympics are the pinnacle of that sort of thing, with the added advantage that they last for weeks. Yesterday we had a mildly funny joke about Dagwood getting in trouble for streaming the Olympics on his phone during a work meeting, but I’m actually kind of appalled by today’s strip, which seems to imply that Olympic runners have their performance scored by judges rather than simply being timed to see who finishes the event the fastest.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/30/24

I love it when a work of art sparks a conversation, raising not one but multiple questions about its characters and its world. For instance, today’s Snuffy Smith has me asking “Doesn’t ‘busking’ usually happen on a sidewalk in a big city? Why is Jughaid doing it out in the middle of an open field somewhere” but also “Doesn’t Jughaid wear that stupid hat all the time? Does Ol’ Bullet repeatedly attack him when he does, and if so why don’t we get to see it more often?”

Shoe, 7/30/24

Ha ha! A laugh track, get it? Because his political promises are laughable! Good one! Say, does anyone involved in the creation of Shoe know what a “website” is and how one works? Like have they ever used the internet, at all?