The last Sunday of August is nothing special, and on the last Sunday of August there’s a whole page of Sunday comics that are nothing special either. The summer theme is there, I guess, but I think half these cartoonists don’t even want to bother with that anymore. Plus, they have to submit their strips about 18,000 days in advance so they weren’t even thinking about summer when they wrote them. Maybe Blondie’s Dean Young is shivering his ass off in the cold, unforgiving winter in his drafty, dilapidated cabin with his single sad candle.

Jump Start

Jump Start is one of those strips, like Get Fuzzy or Frazz, that will cram a whole lot of ideas and meandering directions into one installment. Jump Start is far from the worst offender on any given day, but today’s strip is quite muddled. It’s a camp talent show, and Kenny Crunchy can play the guitar with his stank-ass feet. We’re making sense so far!

But then Dr. Appleby’s talent is throwing a bunch of balls with both hands? A weak premise! The greatest dodgeball player of all time would not just throw these large, red, rubber spheres of torture all willy-nilly! He would calculate his every move as if it were a chess game against the Game of Thrones fan and Putin-obsessed chessmaster Garry Kasparov! It’s also about the catching!

I also think it’s against the Hippocratic Oath to do harm in any fashion, Appleby. Reread your manual.

Beetle Bailey

It took me a few scans of this stupid garbage to fully understand the tenuous and scraggly threads of this particular narrative. Most importantly, and for the love of god, why are these speech balloons placed so fucking poorly? I’m sitting here thinking that BRIGADIER GENERAL AMOS T. HALFTRACK’s men are either losing their marbles OR they’re taking advantage of Halftrack’s senility by calling him up on the phone and amusedly addressing him by much lower ranks. Then I find out that we are only seeing one side of the conversation. Thank you, speech balloons, for pointing at the telephone cord instead of Halftrack’s mustachioed pie hole.

And then Halftrack’s mad because he was only able to scrounge up the three worst golf companions? Holy Hell, dude, you got THE DOG to answer your phone and agree to your invitation! What more do you want?

Family Circus

I always ALWAYS have to mention that Jeffy’s Mom has got it goin’ on. That’s a given.

Now that THAT’S out of the way, until next time of course, let’s focus our attention to the fact that three-year-old Jeffy has one hell of an arm on him. That fence is 10 feet high and he was able to get it up to 8 feet with an overhand throw? Goddamn, someone find this kid a scout immediately. He’ll be recruited to the Houston Astros by the time’s he’s seven! And that’s one of the good teams!

Mallard Fillmore

Remember when the Internet starting exploding in the late ’90s and every person born before 1965 was freaking out about the complete lack of privacy inherent in such a new and scary, connected world? Now they have Facebook accounts with names like “BobboCarsonCity58” or “Philandtammy Dirksen” and they freely say stuff like “I found moles digging into my cabbage patch earlier this week, so I went to the Home Depot at 451 Franklin Ave. to buy some more mulch for my backyard behind my $750,000 house at 761 Drucker Dr., where I spend the hours of 1pm – 4pm on Saturdays with my back turned to the street and completely unaware of my surroundings.”

Life is funny sometimes.

Old Nerd: “‘The California Air Quality Control Board on Thursday announced a state ban on the sale of gas-powered vehicles in California after 2035. I understand the state’s motivation for announcing and enforcing the ban. Electric vehicles aren’t powerful enough to pull a U-Haul, so we’re all trapped here.’ – Comedian Argus Hamilton”

Who in Dick Van Dyke’s poopy pants is Argus Hamilton? Let’s look him up!… “Robin Williams has called him ‘the Will Rogers of the Baby Boom’.” So what does that mean, exactly? In a cohort of annoying, entitled individuals, Argus Hamilton is the most annoying? That’s what it sounds like to me. That’s what I interpreted and I’ll hear no more about it!

activist1234: “Very smart comic today. We used to long for fame, but anymore it’s privacy that is rarer. What disturbs me are all the young people I’ve talked with who see no need for privacy and willingly surrender it.”

Privacy, in the way upper middle-aged people see it, no longer means anything anymore. Young people do not give a shit about the kind of privacy that Boomers think is important, and instead of accepting this, they harp on it over and over again like it’s a character flaw of a younger generation.

Ironically, these people are willingly typing in credit card numbers in any sketchy link they see in their AOL inboxes, so don’t talk to us about privacy. Go bitch about it on Truth Social.

James: “There are a lot of addictive properties to the internet, so I take Mallard’s meaning. That’s why I always have a book (yes, a real one) handy. Of course, many of the internet and social media’s denizen’s have long since lost the ability to read unless it’s on a phone screen.”

While I do appreciate James’ relatively calm and non-belligerent comment, I have to point out that the tired talking point of “young people are illiterate because of Facebook”, usually coupled with a smug satisfaction of NOT reading any books electronically, doesn’t land because older people consume social media like water every single day just like the rest of the first world human population. The only difference is that they’re projecting for some reason. It’s like they’re  all ashamed because, after years of 1950’s / 1960’s-style passive aggressive, emotionally abusive upbringing, they are irrevocably broken!

That gets a last laugh from me, I tell you what. And I’m sorry, I’m feisty today. That Mallard Fillmore really brings out the worst in me!