When the well runs dry

On Monday I said that I could forgive Stephan Pastis for recycling Sunday's joke in Pearls Before Swine due to the nature of the way that some newspapers distribute their titles. Unfortunately, he recycled the same joke again Tuesday and Wednesday. I was going to leave it alone and bitch about it at the end of the week, since running a single joke with minor variations through an entire week is practically a tradition in this realm (as any long time FoxTrot fan can tell you).

So imagine my surprise when today's PBS strip continued the "comic strip characters aging" theme, but discarded the Family Circus satire in favour of a Blondie gag. If there's one thing worse than being lazy enough to stretch a one-beat gag over an entire week, it's not having the conviction to follow-through. I'll tell you this now: if tomorrow's strip goes back to riffing on Family Circus I'll be quite irked to say the least. And for the record, I don't think Blondie Bumstead would ever say "gonna".

In other news, see if you notice anything unusual about yesterday's Adam @ Home:


At first glance it appears to be a variation on the tired back-to-school "kids are so hard to shop for" gag, but anyone who's old enough to vote might notice the reversal of gender stereotypes. Usually at that age, boys are thought to be content to wear just about anything, and girls are portrayed as impossibly picky. It's not the most ground-breaking role reversal, mind you, but it's refreshing in contrast to, let's say, today's Baby Blues.