Archive: Sherman’s Lagoon

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Baby Blues, 8/9/23

C’mon, Darryl, you don’t need Wren for a three-legged race; just tie a shoe on that nose.

Crankshaft, 8/9/23

They train surgeons not to say “Oops”, but Ed’s dermatologist missed the class on “Holy $#%!!”. I hope she took the Continuing Medical Education unit on “Get me the belt sander.”

Between Friends, 8/9/23

Don’t get too relaxed there, Susan—Lucky Eddie could be lurking just around the corner, looking to get lucky.

Luann, 8/9/23

It’s not unusual for authors to tire of their main character—I mean, Arthur Conan Doyle is a famous example, and look what happened to Barney Google. Judge Parker turned into Sam Driver, Action Lawyer and stayed that way for decades. Team Luann has done a lot to sideline their protagonist: shunted her off alone to Community College, gave her dweeby thrall Gunther an actual girlfriend, introduced secondary characters (Tara, Stef) with far more robust backstories, etc. So why keep Luann around? Waiting for readers to get as sick of her as her creators have? I have news: that ship is a mere dot on the far horizon.

Anyway, former hottie Tiffany is hosting a pool party at her Dad’s house (persistently and annoyingly called “the Manse”). Tiffany covets and covertly ogles Stef’s boyfriend Kip, who is staying at the pool house because of the reasons, and complains that she doesn’t have a boyfriend. But Tiffany has never had a boyfriend; her Whole Deal was that she was “popular” in the abstract, i.e., she had a world of choice but never made one. It seems pretty clear that she “wants” Kip only to shore up her sagging, um, confidence, because Kip is so dull and dimensionless he couldn’t get cast as a Ken in that Barbie movie.

Sherman’s Lagoon, 8/9/23

Your son, Herman, Megan, c’mon, get with the program.

In an echo of February’s “Chinese Spy Balloon” incident, Sherman ate a bunch of helium balloons found in a crate of derelict property that fell into Kapupu Lagoon en route to Whacko’s Party Store. The Kapupu Self-Defense Forces seem a lot more on the ball about territorial integrity than our own armed forces were, for which their reward will be a deluge of shark guts.


Josh has sworn a Blood Oath not to cover Luann. A Blood Oath. Worth more than a few bucks, wouldn’t you agree? Make a generous contribution to the Comics Curmudgeon today!

—Uncle Lumpy

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Crankshaft, 9/1/22

“With no access to our XOR drive, we have to transcode the online IP to the optic matrix—injecting the form factor won’t scale unless we hack the primary FTP antenna, and our bandwidth visibility is sub-optimal. So our only choice is to connect the back-end mainframe unless you can tap dance. Seriously, we’re going live, grab a top hat and cane!”

Funky Winkerbean, 9/1/22

Oh, c’mon—you guys were literally the entire high school back in the day. No amount of “acting like that” could “exclude you from things,” much as that would have been a better outcome for everybody.

Sherman’s Lagoon, 9/1/22

“Hairless” aside, I really enjoy when Sherman‘s artist exports a character model to a different species: Megan’s pearls, nose, and belligerence are a perfect match.

Gil Thorp, 9/1/22

Hoho, Gil Thorp is going all-in with “Gil and Mimi’s marriage is on the rocks,” and Gil better watch out. First, Mimi challenges her son to an escalating round of Love Declarations (“More than Dad—Say it!“), then deftly sets him up to ally with the younger son of Gil’s hated Valley Tech rival. Soon Gil, separated and jobless, will survey his sad motel room and wonder where it all went wrong. Right here, Gil, while you were sitting on your butt hoping it would all work out. The same way you coach.


–Uncle Lumpy

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Sherman’s Lagoon, 8/30/22

Sharks mate only rarely and in the murky ocean depths, so Megan is understandably fascinated by Make-Out Island. “But where do the claspers go?” she muses, “What? Oh my God ick, ick, ick, ick, ICK!

Sally Forth, 8/30/22

While Flesh-Ted is busy with his existential terror, Psyche-Ted presents some interesting perspectives on Mind-Body duality. Which entity has agency for, say, body-leaving? Surely not the body itself; that leads only to paradox! So is Psyche-Ted here addressing himself, or instead Consciousness-Ted, an unseen third entity capable of a) falling and b) influencing Psyche-Ted in some unspecified way.

Perhaps we can resolve the issue empirically! Suppose Psyche-Ted lets go, taking with him all Ted’s whimsy, pop-culture trivia, and manchild traits. Will he leave behind a pragmatic, hardworking, down-to-earth adult (i.e., a plugger), or instead a soulless zombie? And who in this family could tell them apart?

Some ride, huh?

Funky Winkerbean, 8/30/22

Oh, here we go again. During her high-school years, Cindy Summers was the Popular Girl; it was her entire identity. She failed to “fit in” exactly once, when all the guys assumed she already had a date and didn’t ask her to the Big Dance, so she had to endure an all-night mope-fest choking down bad pizza with loser Les.

Yet during the Time-Travel Reunion seven years ago, Old Cindy tried to peddle “popularity is just a mask we wear to cover up self-loathing” to Young Cindy, who was clearly not in a self-loathing frame of mind. Now going-on-sixty looking-like-thirty, married to a young movie star and the envy of her peers, Cindy tries to retcon herself as an outcast? Sorry, girl— Les Moore is the Outcast. You’re the Popular Girl. Shoulder the burden and move on.

The Phantom, 8/30/22

“Mozz predicts the death of the Phantom again … and again … and again …” began back in 2017. And by now Diana, Babudan, Guran and the others have got to be questioning the old man’s motivations. I mean, he’s scribbling his “Death of the Phantom” fanfic directly into the Chronicles, the official historical record of Phantomry, in a desperate third attempt to make it happen.

Who’s bankrolling all this? My guess: Mozz is in league with The Cobra, The Nomad, and the criminal elite running Rhodia to return the Phantom dynasty—under son, heir, and 22nd Phantom Kit—to its birthplace on the Indian subcontinent, leaving Bangalla open to their predations.


–Uncle Lumpy