Post Content

Crock, 8/12/26

I’ll admit it: I am, in fact, a gentleman of a certain age, which means I must begin working out how I’m going to start facing mortality. Turning, as one does, to the comics for masculine role models, I learn that, if I feel my heart starting to give out on me, I should simply glare out over the parapet in manly silence waiting for it to pass (“it” here being either this cardiac event or my fleeting life on earth). And if anyone tries to engage me in conversation in my final moments? Well, that’s when I make it their problem that I’m dying, and make them feel bad about it.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 8/12/26

Pinocchio has what looks to me to be a big frown on his face, but maybe that’s just supposed to be what his face as a puppet looks like? Unclear. If it’s the latter, it’s depressing that he looks like that all the time, but if it’s the former it’s because he’s learning that the autonomy he long yearned for carries with it the terrible burdens of responsibility for one’s own personhood, which is frankly even more depressing.

Post Content

Slylock Fox, 8/3/26

I have no idea what the relationship is between Count Weirdly and the little purple being who’s always hanging around his workplace/castle — is it his creation? his adopted child? his [gulp] biological child? was it spawned by some unnatural process that doesn’t fall into any of those three categories cleanly but falls into all of them in part? — but clearly it views the count in a paternal light, and it’s pretty devastating that it’s so excited to show off the Count’s supposedly legitimate business enterprise to Slylock, only for the Fox Detective to immediately debunk the whole scam. Also, unrelated, but I’ve never really had much reason to contemplate whether Weirdly was wearing anything under his trademark shapeless nightgown, but the very vivid buttrack on display here implies that he probably isn’t.

Crock, 8/3/26

The past is in fact another country, as this Crock strip from 1998 demonstrates. Sure, the idea of a boy baby aggressively hitting on a girl baby and being punished for it is timeless, but why is the girl named “Cyber”? Was this the setup to a joke about computers that turned out to be too hard to execute so they fell back on the classics, or did the Crock creative team in 1998 simply say “What are they naming girl babies these days? Cyber, right? That’s a word I hear a lot but I don’t know what it means, so it’s probably a girl’s name.”

The Lockhorns, 8/3/26

I spent some time trying to parse Leroy’s facial expression here and the conclusion I came to is that it’s supposed to represent “sophisticated horny.” Like he’s thinking, “Ah, yes, women’s beach volleyball … the intellectual’s sport. You get to enjoy athletes at the top of their game demonstrating their prowess at leaping and spiking the ball, all in a beautiful seaside setting. And if one of these statuesque competitors were to engender a pleasant feeling of arousal in me while I watched? Well, I’m mostly trying to keep tabs on various stats to see how my fantasy team is doing, but that would be an added bonus.”

Post Content

Click the banner to contribute by PayPal or credit card, or see below for other options.

Oh my gosh it’s the very last day of the 2026 Comics Curmudgeon Summer Fundraiser! Hurry! Thank you!

Crankshaft, 7/24/26

Boy, these multiverse stories sure get complicated! Like when Barry Allen Flash teamed up in the past with Jay Garrick Flash to battle The Thinker, The Fiddler, and Shade so Barry could persuade real-world writer Gardner Fox to write a comic book about their adventures! Or when Spider-Men Tom Holland, Andrew Garfield, and Tobey Maguire team up to defeat Electro, Green Goblin, and Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man: No Way Home to keep the hordes of people who know Spidey’s not-so-secret identity from overrunning our world. Or here, where transparent authorial self-insert character “Batton Thomas” teams up with opaque actual author self-insert character Tom Batiuk, presumably to Fight Crime. I don’t know, but if I were Lillian Mackenzie, Harry Dinkle, or Ed Crankshaft, I’d watch my back—these guys are cartoonists—they have erasers and they know how to use them.

Bizarro, 7/24/26

Whoops, looks like the stress finally got to our guy. Forget what I said yesterday.

Crock, 7/24/26

“At last! Our comic strip is saved!”

Phantom, 7/24/26

Chatu “The Python” has surrendered and put on the AI-enabled “Tokoloshe” control anklet, and I’m frankly a little disappointed in him. I mean, this is the guy who tried to Ebolify the whole world through an infected fruit-bat scheme, and blew up half of downtown Mawitaan just to get back at his nemesis the Phantom. He may or may not be a coward, but there is no way he’s gonna let some rich upstart out-evil him! All those years in that cage must’ve softened him up, or maybe he went mad from that interminable drum solo. Either way, get ready for an epic supervillain match-up and battle—now enhanced with AI!

No Comments of the Week on my watch; last week’s victor Victor Von gets a twofer.

—Uncle Lumpy