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Hi and Lois, 2/6/24

God, this one is super bleak. Lois has convinced herself that, sure, things are tight and they can’t afford to order pizza very often even though the kids are always whining for it, but what if she just learned how to make it herself? And what if the kids learned to love that even more than the crap from Dominio’s? “Mom’s homemade pizza,” they’d call it, and it would be a fond childhood memory they’d carry with them the rest of their lives, something they looked forward to, not a marker of her and Hi’s failure to provide them with what they really wanted. This fantasy lasts mere seconds into the children’s’ actual encounter with her malformed, fucked-up pizza, and look at her face — she is devastated.

Family Circus, 2/6/24

Jeffy, meanwhile, has been abandoned by his parents and is being forced to clean the house himself even though he’s a toddler, and he’s doing fine. “Noooo, Jeffy, you’re screwing this up, do you even know what cleaning is” Dolly whines in the background, but Jeffy doesn’t care. Look at that face. Cool competence and determination. He’s thriving for the first time in his short, dumb life.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/6/24

I often think that contemporary middle- and upper-class Americans create a culture of child safety that’s unprecedented in history, with children monitored at all times well into their teenage years and not given space to explore or gain useful life skills in ways that will be really damaging down the road. But then I see strips like this and think maybe there’s something to it.

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Mary Worth, 2/5/24

Say, remember way back at the beginning of this storyline, when Sonia showed up at Keith’s doorstep insisting that he was her father, and due to their shared hair color and love of root beer he just kind of went along with it, even though many of us were like “Um, Keith? DNA test? Hello??? DNA test????” Well, big news: he’s finally getting around to it, and sure, most of us would want to get confirmation of paternity before we went through the trouble of reconnecting (sexually) with our long-lost ex/supposed baby mama and scaring away the weird fake hippie dude who was always hanging around for reasons that seemed predatory but were never quite clear. But, let’s be clear: most of us are cowards. Anyway, can’t wait for Keith’s ol’ pal Sal to call him from the lab and say “Yeah, your instincts were right on. This was definitely root beer.”

Hi and Lois, 2/5/24

The joke here is obviously that Lois is at the end of her rope and has resorted to the flimsiest of pretenses to force her children to stop talking, but I’d like to believe that it’s Hi she’s addressing in the second panel. It’s his moment of silence because he’s dying, which she hasn’t told him about yet.

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Blondie, 2/4/24

I am of course more than happy to call Blondie wildly out of touch, culturally. But I gotta say, I trust this strip implicitly when it comes to the weird, terrible little games that old people play on Facebook that I only know about from their truly off-putting ads and that I assume somehow put recurring charges on your credit card that are very, very difficult to stop. To me, strips like today’s contain valuable ethnographical information and I am grateful for it.

Mark Trail, 2/4/24

OK, two questions here. One: why are we calling the shots we are giving to the horses a “fertility-control vaccine” instead of a “contraceptive shot”? We already have a perfectly good word in English for a medical intervention that prevents pregnancy, and it’s “contraceptive”! Two: why are they giving two-year doses of contraceptives fertility-control vaccines to, presumably, the female horses, when it’d probably be just as easy if not easier to permanently sterilize the male ones? Is this a plot by Big Horse Roundup to get easy government contracts every two years? FOLLOW THE MONEY, PEOPLE