As all of you who read the newspaper probably already know, this is Dagwood and Blondie’s 75^th anniversary.  Leaving aside for the moment all of the observations which I could make regarding the two of them (for instance, why did Blondie abandon her lucrative 80s band in favor of opening a catering business, and how come Dagwood eats a jillion sandwiches a day while staying skinny as a rail?  My guess is that he’s probably addicted to toad-licking, or as we call in on the streets, “Doing the T”), I’m just going to focus on how weird this entire anniversary thing is just bay itself.  For instance, if they’ve been married 75 years, that means that, assuming they’re not part of some weird Indian childhood elephant-giving arranged marriage, then they’re at least 93 years old.  C’mon now, a healthy diet and exercise will only carry a person so far, and I think we all deserve a better explanation.  I suspect that Dagwood and Blondie are both actually vampires or one of your other less common varieties of greater undead, and then each night they transform into their true hideous forms and fly out the window to go and feast on the blood of the innocent (this is why Dagwood is always late getting to work, he’s still hung over from the previous night’s horrible death-feast).  Or, maybe they’re like the Dread Pirate Roberts, and every so many years they choose someone else to take their place while they return to their ancestral birthplace in lower Madagascar to eat carob nuts and hurl koalas at one another.  Or maybe Dagwood made a pact with a demonic being back in the day (demonic being flavor of the month: Jamocha Double Fudge Cthulhu) and gained for himself a perpetually hot wife and immortality, but at the cost of the single dorkiest haircut in all of human history (worse even than that of little-remembered Saxon monarch Brokthlurgh Death-Mullet) and always having to wear a ridiculous talisman of power smack dab in the middle of his shirt.

            But whatever, it matters not.  The real mystery is how he and Blondie got all the other cartoon characters to put aside their differences and go to a big party peaceably.  Take Hagar the Horrible, for instance.  Even assuming he has a time machine (which, according to today’s paper, he does) why would he just go to the party and have a good time?  I mean, he’s a Viking, he’s gotta be fighting the urge to do some serious pillaging.  Really, the strip ought to show him and his horde standing on Dagwood’s front porch with all their torches and stuff, with Lucky Eddie coming out of the house and saying “Sorry, Hagar, they say they just got a new carpet installed and we have to wipe our feet.”  Because that always happens when Hagar goes anywhere, he’s got to the be least murderous Viking ever, unless every day right after the third panel ends, he and his troops fall into an orgy of untold carnage and bloodshed, which would actually be kind of cool.

            And what about all the comics who didn’t show up for the party?  I mean, Curtis is some kid from the inner city and he made it to the party, Dick Tracy was able to take enough time off from fighting improbably yet serendipitously-named deformed theme villains to drop by, even that Christian caveman guy managed to show up, despite the fact that everybody knows that Dagwood is so totally a Darwin groupie and a noted Atheist.  Who’s missing from this picture?  Yup, Mark Trail.  Now, I understand that during the week Mark Trail has lately been busy with his Retarded Murderess Skunk Lady Canoe Trip of Doom (full details in a blog yet to come), but what’s old Mark doing this Sunday?  I’ll tell you what, he’s watching kangaroos make out.  C’mon Mark, you can indulge in your vile perversions on your own time, today someone else needed you for once and you just had to go get a little time at the Outback.  Jeez man, you need an intervention or something.

            And where’s Snoopy?  According to today’s paper, he had already promised to take Woodstock and his homies on a “picnic”, but what’s up with that?  I think we can all see that someone thinks they’re too good to hang out with all the other talking animals at Dagwood’s Party.  Honestly Snoopy, are you saying you think you’re too good to hang out with such greats as Garfield, Grimmy, and That Annoying Little Oval Headed Kid from Family Circus?  At least Funky Winkerbean was off stepping on a landmine in Afganistan, and he’s been such a downer lately you wouldn’t want him at a party anyhow.

            Also, who’s that guy in the back row, between Dick Tracy and Ziggy (who, by the way, must be wearing a jet pack or something, cause he looks like he’s about seven feet tall)?  He kind of looks like Aquaman (the pansy Superfriends version) or maybe the distilled evil of every boy band ever all boiled down and poured into one hideous ungodly abomination of a human being.  His short kind of looks like he might be Captain Marvel, though everyone knows that Captain Marvel hates Ziggy with the burning passion of a thousand fiery suns and has ever since Ziggy stole his prom date back in the 70s.  I suspect he’s actually a Communist Chinese secret agent, sent to steal our country’s humor secrets and use them to improve the only comic they have back in China (it’s pretty lame right now; it’s most just about Chairman Mao living in a Canadian Suburb and getting frustrated with his incompetent coworkers while trying to balance career and family, often with hilarious results)

            Finally, while most of the characters present have tastefully chosen to just have a glass of champagne (though Hagar has clearly opted for a nice, foamy PBR), Snuffy Smith has brought a big ol’ jug of three X moonshine.  Sure, it seems funny now, but wait until later on tonight when he gets all wasted and makes a crude pass at Sally Forth before collapsing in a smelly, drunken, white trashy heap in the foyer.  Okay, on second thought, that might be kind of funny after all.