Shoe, 9/21/16
You know how you can look at something for every day for years and never really notice it, until one day a slight shift in perspective totally blows your mind? Well, I read this dumb joke about how Shoe, the title character of the strip Shoe, spends a lot of time at strip clubs, and I was starting to work myself up to a joke about how the very idea of sexy live nude bird-women really brings to the fore the uncomfortable realities of how the bird-people of Shoe have both avian and mammalian characteristics, when suddenly I realized:
Shoe doesn’t wear clothes.
Every other bird-person in this strip wears clothes! Not Shoe. He wears white low-top sneakers and smokes cigars but otherwise goes around fully nude. And everyone just goes along with this! What … what is going on here. Why is he naked all the time. WHYYYYY
Mary Worth, 9/21/16
I’m kind of surprised that this SAMHSA-approved substance abuse counselor is doing his intake with his newest adult patient with his mother sitting right there in the room with him, or that he seems to be taunting him for his inability to score Vicodin. I’m not that familiar with the treatment modalities for opioid addiction, though. I’m learning just like you all are!
Funky Winkerbean, 9/21/16
Becky’s wordless emotional arc here, as she goes from hope that her husband’s obsessive geekery might actually improve their family’s financial situation for once to mingled anger and crushing despair, is legitimately the best-executed thing on the comics pages today.
Pluggers, 9/21/16
Pluggers haven’t had sex for years, guys. Years.
Crankshaft, 9/8/16
Crankshaft trufans (by which I mean Crankshaft haters, which are sadly the only kinds of Crankshaft trufans out there) have long asked themselves: when will Ed Crankshaft, who is remarkably, dangerously bad at his job as a school bus driver, finally be fired? He’s managed to so far stay employed despite the extensive and actionable damage caused by his incompetent driving. But can his career survive actual child endangerment? Stay tuned!
Pluggers, 9/8/16
It probably says something terrible about me that the most affection I’ve ever felt for a plugger came from this cartoon: a plugger-lady sitting silently, unsmiling, staring at her tiny TV, waiting for something terrible to happen to the host of the gameshow she watches every day. Maybe it won’t happen today. Maybe it won’t ever happen. But if it does, she wants to be there to see it.
Spider-Man, 8/31/16
I love the idea of an Ant-Man who is 100% fed up with any kind of mystifying legends or penumbra around superheroes and villains. “Look, my name’s Scott, Egghead’s name is Elihas, yours is … well, you didn’t tell me, even though I teed up a perfect opportunity for you to do that, and I think that’s kind of rude, but let’s not dwell on it. Anyway, we’re just … we’re just people, OK? People with regular people names. I’m just an ordinary guy, who happens to be able to shrink down to ant size and is wearing a helmet with … God, I don’t even know. I guess those things coming out from my ears are supposed to represent an ant’s mandibles? Except what’s in between them? Like, an olive or something? The whole thing’s absurd. Please, call me Scott, it’s the only thing that tethers me to reality at this point.”
Funky Winkerbean, 8/31/16
I guess, if you’re reading Funky Winkerbean and care enough to squint to see the small text at the bottom of the first panel, you probably already have enough information to properly interpret it: In a couple of weeks, a Rotary Club in Mentor (a suburb in the Cleveland area, which is the home of Tom Batuik and the setting of the Funkyverse strips) is having a “Lisa’s Legacy” run, a real-life version of the in-strip fundraiser/tribute to a character who died of breast cancer, nine years ago. But imagine that you’re trying to parse this without any of that background. It would read like the stuff on some numbers station. “Mentor? Rotary? 9/11? Sir, I believe we’ve intercepted a warning of an impending catastrophic attack.”
Pluggers, 8/31/16
I’m gonna spend a lot of time thinking about the fact that in this panel Elvis is depicted as fully human and not a half-animal beast-man like everyone else in this strip. Is it any wonder they worship his image as their God?
