Post Content

Dustin, 11/7/22

Oh, I’m sorry, did you think that the syndicated comic Dustin was done airing its petty grievances about air travel? Well, you thought wrong, buddy. Today’s petty grievance: when people fly on a commercial airline, an experience during which they are generally dehumanized in various ways, why don’t they simply choose to dress in a manner that society in the year 2022 reserves only for our most formal contexts, like a court appearance or a funeral? Is it because they don’t want to feel even less comfortable than they already do while they’re crammed into a too-small seat for three to seven hours? Is it because, simply as a practical matter, the nature of air travel often results in the clothes you’re wearing getting wrinkled or sweaty or soiled? Is it because human civilization is falling into a state of barbarism? Probably the last one, right? Anyway, the first panel here gives you a good hint as to which airline’s negative vibes provided the material for these strips, but doesn’t spell it out because presumably large multinational corporations are better equipped to crush a syndicated newspaper comic strip’s creative team in court than, say, a Tampa-area Mercedes dealership is.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/7/22

I was wondering why Funky Winkerbean decided to tinker with its timeline, again, making the main cast’s recent high school reunion their fiftieth and pushing the characters from late middle age well into retirement territory. Now we’ve learned that it’s because of plans to change the setting to a near-future dystopia where accelerating climate change is increasingly impossible to ignore. Sure, the folks in Westview didn’t care much about famine-inducing disruption to agriculture in the tropics or the Colorado River basically drying up, but now that “climate damage” has somehow delayed the shipment of an anthology of comics that were published decades ago, we’re going to get to the bottom of this global warming business, by God.

Six Chix, 11/7/22

Someday I hope to have a meeting with a Hollywood exec with the promise of a “hot IP” and go in hard with the pitch that everything Franz Kafka wrote is now in the public domain. Sure, we all know Gregor Samsa died at the end of “The Metamorphosis” (actually, I had forgotten this, I had to read the plot summary for the story on Wikipedia), but what if he had instead left his depressing home and unloving family in Prague and struck out on his own to find his own way in the world? And what if he ended up as a stoner doorman somewhere in New York City? I think this would be a great eight-episode limited series on Paramount+.