If Curtis starts talking about blogs, it’s over
Post Content
Curtis, 10/7/24
While we all like to see a syndicated newspaper comic keep up with times, I’m afraid the occasional bit in Curtis where Curtis faithfully tunes in to his favorite online comic, Dear Ol’ Dad, feels a little out of date, like it’s grounded in the big webcomics boom of the late ’00s and early ’10s. Not that there aren’t still plenty of good online comics, but unless you really go out of your way to follow them (“Dad, can I have $5 a month for the Dear Ol’ Dad Patreon?” “I’m broke, Curtis”), you mostly encounter them appearing at random on your Facebook or Instagram feed. If you’re lucky, they’re cloying panels where blue aliens describe ordinary situations in cutesy circumlocutions; more likely, you get either Off The Mark panels from 2014 that have had the dialogue changed to be racist, or horrifying AI slop where a crying soldier is eating dog food out of a can while dozens of children with too many fingers point and laugh at him, and the caption is “Best Comic Funny [three cry-laughing emojis].” I’m assuming what Curtis is enjoying is the latter.
Slylock Fox, 10/7/24
I think it’s funny that the text makes clear that this is an enlarged photo of Slick Smitty. The strip wants you to know that the new animal society is fully capable of producing normal-sized photos, OK? They just chose not to in this case, for some reason.
Alice, 10/7/24
Reading this panel left-to-right was fun because at first I thought, “Ha ha, it’s funny because Alice is in desperate financial straits,” but then I got to the ATM and was like “AHH AHHH IT HAS LIPS AND A TONGUE WHY ARE THEY THAT COLOR WHY IS THE TONGUE FLAPPING AROUND LIKE THAT AHHHHH”
55 replies to “If Curtis starts talking about blogs, it’s over”
Mary Worth Mashup
Slylock will investigate this, but he holds the shoe store manager as much in contempt as Smitty. Shoes are a relic of the human regime, true sons of the animal revolution go barefoot, like him!
SF:
“Why does Slylock Fox suspect Slick Smitty is the sneaker thief?”
Oh, that’s easy — because Slick Smitty is a well-known recidivist who is responsible for many instances of criminal activity in Slylock’s strip, with which Slylock is intimately familiar. So Slylock doesn’t even need to think through clues; he can just blame the guy.
MW:
“Maybe Ed wanted to attend your relative’s dinner party, but he felt responsibility to his work.
“And, maybe pigs can fly!”
MW:
“Oh, look, Estelle! There are cigarettes flying past my window — Viceroys and Monarchs!”
“Gosh, Mary, you’ve really cornered the market on entomological humor!”
Alice: The new Anthropomorphic Teller Machines are off putting.
“Curtis” is wrong. Webcomics are no longer doing things newspaper comics dare not to do. Today’s “Alice” shows that you don’t need a webpage to flaunt your fetish
With the “feed me” it would assume that Alice is depositing money, not withdrawing. And then I realize the utter horror that the ATMs have taken over the world Skynet style, and are forcing everyone to make deposits of that sweet sweet delicious cash. Alice is desperately for her life trying to deposit money but her cards aren’t being accepted, before the machine devours her whole.
@Ettorre: Today’s 9 Chickweed Lane also shows that you don’t need a webpage to flaunt your fetish. No I did not read today’s 9 Chickweed Lane and you can’t make me.
ALICE: Props to Alice; even when faced with financial mayhem and hallucinations, her grammar is tight.
MW: Of course, Ed and Estelle are going to reunite and eventually marry. But since Estelle is incapable of coming to the simplest “aha” moment without coaching, Mary will have to live with them.
DtM: Now THERE are two mental images that murder the appetite.
Maybe he stole the sneakers. Or maybe the photo got reversed. A good lawyer could make hay of this “evidence,” is what I’m saying.
“cloying panels where blue aliens describe ordinary situations in cutesy circumlocutions”
I hate those with the fire of a thousand duns.
Alice: Someone thought that running both Alice and Glory Hole through an AI machine would be a good idea.
Curtis – Does that last panel intimate that Curtis has gone beyond merely reading a better comic than his own, but now he has gone full Comics Curmudgeon?
Slylock Fox – Slylock and Max are a bit bug-eyed about a basic theft case, though I think I could see the reason.
When the Slylockalypse happened the animals, like Adam and Eve in Eden after eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, recognized their nakedness. Slylock is shoeless, and a look back in archives shows Max is, and animals are mixed on whether or not they wear shoes. While he upholds the authoritarian state apparatus, the pressure to wear shoes grows as the monied interests in footwear want to force the animals to wear shoes, despite the various foot sizes and architecture of animal feet. For the first time Slylock and Max wonder if the state has gone too far, and if they have more in common with Slick Smitty than this security officer serving to uphold Capital.
Alice – Alice shows us that humanity somehow manages to outdo AI not only in the creative arts, but also in the bizarre and uncanny.
CS: Well, at least they’re not dressed in their superhero cosplay costumes.
Off the Mark! Wow! I worked with Off the Mark‘s wife at my only real world job, between college and grad school, in 1993. Which reminds me that I am old, and webcomics are old, and Josh are you kidding about a kid Curtis’s age having a Facebook feed (he would have an Instagram feed, though, because he’s always watching Instagram Reels when he’s not watching YouTube shorts if not TikTok itself), and also I that i do follow several webcomics but they can be classified into “regularly updating comic whose plotline is so byzantine it’s been going for over twenty years” and “similarly long-running comic that is finally resolving its byzantine plot and is updating about once a month now” and “similarly long-running comic that resolved its byzantine plot and is now doing jokes about the cartoonist’s dogs” and “scrappy upstart newer comic that updates every week or three and has been going since, uh, 2009.” With an honorable mention for the daily one I read from the beginning in 2007 that resolved its byzantine plot in 2022 and the creators took a well-earned break. So yeah, webcomics are old and I am old!
And xkcd and Dinosaur Comics too, of course.
@astroboy:
I am more neutral on them, but upon reflection, those comics are the equivalent of Minion Memes for Millennials who still use Facebook
Curtis: Hate to say it, but webcomics have moved on yet another notch now. These days, the main thing is some women with impossibly large breasts will make two video game references and a not very good joke, and then the last panel where they have lesbian sex with Chun-Li will cost you $15 on Patreon.
Alice: An ATM demanding “Feed me” also occurs in American Psycho, but of course Patrick Bateman isn’t nearly as psychologically disturbed a character as Alice.
Assuming people can’t tie their shoes with just one hand? That’s ableism, which is a worse crime than shoplifting!
“Ok, the cast is on the other arm, but what if it is simply a mirror-flipped picture? That would explain the right arm having the cast”
“Aren’t these only with the selfie camera?”
“Maybe the security guard took a selfie with me in the background, then he removed himself from the picture”
“That’s a bit farfetched!”
“Listen Slylock, if you convict by contradiction, I should also get a get out of jail card by simple logical reasoning!”
BF: As the Curtain of Discretion lowers over the upcoming week of unrestrained fucking by Slut Friend and her Dour Gaul, we look forward to seven days of Blonde Friend’s aches, pains, and minor maladies.
DT: 1) The tallest building in Neo-Chicago is pre-Depression, and we’ve got a two-way wrist radio instead of a wrist TV/computer/hologram projector. It’s gonna be a RETRO story!
2) Tracy’s trenchcoat has no cuffs, but the simple sleeves of a long gown or robe or kimono. It’s gonna be a retro STEAMPUNK story!
RMMD: But….but….who’s going to deal with Lou?
Curtis: They are indeed few and far between, but there are still some very good webcomics out there. In fact, right now I have tabs open for Gunnerkrigg Court, Spacetrawler, Girl Genius and Bad Machinery, whose creator John Allison is a confirmed daily Luann reader. Er, maybe that last bit doesn’t help my case.
Slick Smitty is a fine choice for the suspect, but the theft of sneakers would have been a great opportunity for the return of
Sneaky the Raccoon to the comics page! Oh, you are telling me he died of old age? How can it be, it has only been… OH MY GOD!
Curtis: It’s true, a hilarious premise like ‘eating a can of dog food by accident’ is simply too radical for newspaper comics. Luckily, Curtis has a found a loophole: you can still describe a funnier comic in their boring comic without actually showing it, thus circumventing the rules of powerful newsprint publishers. Kind of like how you can publish any copyrighted video on youtube as long as there’s a little square on the bottom right of you ‘reacting’ to it. Comedy is safe again (but for how long?)!
SFx: I really want to know what the context is for that (enlarged) photo. Was that Slick fleeing the store with his ill-gotten gains? Seems like that would be a lot more damning that whatever’s going on here.
Alice: Ha, it’s a homage to that classic scene in American Psycho except kinda less disturbing. Or, now that I look at that ATM’s face again, maybe more disturbing? I’m really not sure.
Slylock Fox and Comics for Kids: The heck with the sneakers, the real mystery here is how Slick Smitty got on those tight-fitting Styrofoam shoes. And why he’s wearing white shoes after Labor Day. And why he and the store detective are wearing the same shoes, and suit. And what happened to Smitty’s black tie? Gosh, there’s a lot of mystery here, isn’t there?
I notice that both this strip and the one Josh links to have the ending “punchline” of “Online comics can do things traditional newspaper comics can’t!” I would suggest Ray Billingsley uses Dear Ol’ Dad to describe the comic he’d like to write but was told not to, except that Curtis’ dad, from what I can tell, is less a bumbling moron and more just a stick-in-the-mud, and also the comics being described are incredibly hacky. So now I think he uses it whenever he comes up with an idea that’s out-of-character and/or unspeakably terrible.
Alice: As an appreciator of eldritch horrors, I’m here to tell you that it is a mark of genius to make normally inanimate objects seem as human as the people they interact with. Typically, that’s done by raising the bar on how the object is depicted, not lowering it on the humans, but whatever, the Old Gods are not picky, horror is horror, etc.
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: All of those got their start in the early ’10s at latest. So basically, the only good webcomics out there that aren’t either pure engagement bait or on Webtoon are holdovers from the golden age of webcomics.
Are we sure that the rent-a-cop isn’t accusing Slick Smitty because he needed an excuse he could give to HR for why he’s having a rare human posing for photos that he’s then having blown up to poster size on company time?
DtM: Watching his mom eat the same meal, Dennis comes to the only logical conclusion: Alice has hairy boobs. I look forward to the coming strip where he tells this to Henry’s co-worker.
CS: LET’S GET READY TO RUMBLLLLLEEEE!!!
MW: “WAIT! STOP! Say no more, Estelle. My delicate psyche can’t handle anything of an intimate nature. I’ll get the vapors.”
JP: Which begs the question, Has Neddy ever made a visit that didn’t turn out to be unpleasant?
MW – “Ed’s got a banana dick.” That’s my guess for Stell’s next line.
Is Slylock Fox only calling on Smitty because this isn’t Count Weirdly’s shoe size?
MW: Jesus, this is straight-up gaslighting.
Alice: I don’t like this reimagining of Little Shop of Horrors…
SFx: Still, it was nice of the undercover officer to go to all the trouble and cost of creating an enlarged photo so the readers could see the evidence against Smitty. If Smitty put that much trouble into remembering which arm he had his fake cast on, he’d get away with more crimes.
@Ettorre: Also, a clothing (even shoe) store is likely to have a mirror!
@Morgan Wick: Curtis’s dad can’t do these specific punchlines because the earlier one involves grilling outside your house and I’m pretty sure the Curtises live in an apartment, and today’s comes from the fourth verse of Run-DMC’s 1986 hit “You Be Illin'” and we all know that Greg disdains “rap” music.
(Really we all know that Greg was born around 1986 and disdains Run-DMC as grandpa rap.)
RMMD-And cue the “Beat Lou With a Baseball Bat” scene.
Curtis-It’s funny because the family is so poor Greg has deliberately bought dog food for the family to eat.
FC-That is the finest cat food made by Mary Worth.
Slylock Fox-To me it looks like those blue shoes are rather small for Slick Smitty’s feet.
@Cleveland Mocks:
MW: “WAIT! STOP! Say no more, Estelle. My delicate psyche can’t handle anything of an intimate nature. I’ll get the vapors.”
The Vapors is a 19th century euphemism for flatulence, hence all the jokes about fainting. With all the high-fiber muffins Mary has been shoving down people’s throats for years, “the vapors” is a well accepted condition in and around Charterstone.
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: Mine were respectively Girl Genius, Order of the Stick, Sam & Fuzzy, Rusty & Co., and Skin Horse. I am reliably informed that some of the youth have gotten back into Homestuck.
There are probably some good recent webcomics but how would I know? I’m old! (Oh Trixie Slaughteraxe For President dates from 2015, there’s one.)
Crankshaft-“Let’s go beat an angry mob.”
SFx: Remember when Sherlock Holmes would solve crimes while giving Dr. Watson a piggyback ride? Slylock Fox remembers.
C’shaft: So it turns out the brilliant plan the Superfriends had…was a counter-protest! I’d sure like to know how they got Harry involved; maybe they told him they were trying to burn his Claude Barlow biography.
Dustin: Ha-ha, women, amirite? We’ll make fun of them for spending hundreds of dollars to take care of their physical appearance, and if they don’t we’ll make fun of them for not taking care of their physical appearance!
GT: Like the Joker, Marty Moon feels incomplete without his greatest adversary.
JP: Maybe Neddy has rejection sensitive dysphoria, and being in a situation where she is undoubtably going to be perceived as rude, stupid, and self-centered has triggered it. Or maybe she really just is rude, stupid, and self-centered.
Luann: It was so kind of Kip to reassure Tiffany that she shouldn’t be ashamed of her vague, mostly forgotten weight gain.
MW: “I switched that bitch Mitzi’s drugs because she and Ed were getting too close.”
Phantom: Man, no wonder Avarice is confused about where it is. Oregon Trail on the Apple IIe had better graphics.
RMMD: In a strip where anything at all happens, this conversation would result in Lou in a body bag.
SFX – Sure, the cast is on the wrong arm, but posing for the security camera with the stuff you’re stealing is next-level stupid.
Alice: It’s nice to see a strip brave enough to update Videodrome to a slightly more modern setting.
Curtis: There certainly are a lot of redactions in that paper.
Why have I gotten the impression that Alice has extremely unpleasant body odor?
CS, meta: Outside of the current storyline, here’s a bit of reality when it comes to the local movie theatre prospering in the Battyverse, where well-attended global premieres occur, along with well-attended old-time silent movies.
Alice: Maybe the ATM wants Tuesday Chix’s sandwich.
Frazz: I hope she’s getting therapy.
Luann: It’s funny to witness the amount of clip art the Evanses have developed for each character in this strip.
CS: You know, when I saw the “bat-signal” strip, I thought the stupidest thing they could do is a counter-protest. I’m disappointed Batiuk couldn’t do something even more stupid.
Dinkle is very unhappy. He got woken up at 2 in the morning, and he won’t be able to sell any of his books. Not that he won’t try, though.
Phantom: That’s not just any rock. That’s from the Major Treasure Room as the rock that David used to kill Goliath.
Existentialism Today
– CANDORVILLE:. Why?
– SALLY FORTH:. Why?
– some other comic today:. Why,?
BLONDIE:. Find three differences in today’s panels
CS:. So Crazy and the Comix Store staff are picketing and burning books? Do they know why they’re there?
FRAZZ:. Today’s last panel so surprised me I literally lol.
GA:. A budding iconoclast, she’ll decide to name white one Ebony and let brother name black one Ivory (“you gotta, Bro”)
JUMP START:. The rookie returns to make a trip.
FG, ML: To broaden my comic tastes I listened to other mudges and started Flash Gordon. But it goes so fast, changing places, characters, dimensions daily that it’s tough for a MW reader to keep up. Thankful for Sunday summaries. Sunday-only Mara Llave however is more my snail speed.
NON SEQUITUR:. Too political to comment on so he sure not to read it. No matter who hands it to you.
ZITS:. Poor cat. What’s his name again?
MW: As others have pointed out many, many times, Ed wasn’t working that day. He just decided to “handle an emergency” at the cost of his social obligation, when there are obviously plenty of vets in Santa Royale who could have taken the case. At least now I’m seeing that Estelle’s cartoonish reaction to dead puppies was to show how wrong she was in this situation.
Zits: “ChatGPT to the rescue!”
FC: KittyCat bites Dolly. “Hmm, yes, I do like human flesh. Thanks for the suggestion.”
@taig:
#49. CS:. Taig, right. But then I read their signs which look like they’re supporting ban and burners.
@Baja Gaijin: Ha ha!
@taig, CS: At least Batiuk didn’t
steal fromuse the tactic from the Other Comics Cinematic Universe and have everyone coming out of portals.We won’t get it, but it would be a hoot for the protestors to clash and battle through different strips, akin to “Blazing Saddles”.