Elder Sunday
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Crankshaft, 2/23/25
Wait, why does John need Crazy Harry’s help? By Spider-Man logic, if he had been bitten by a radioactive cleaning lady, shouldn’t he have gained the proportional strength and powers of a cleaning lady, including access to common cleaning lady tools like stepladders and the foresight to deploy them? Or are we actually operating on real-world logic, and after suffering a tragic bite he’s just feeling increasingly feeble and woozy, due to radiation poisoning?
Panel from Slylock Fox, 2/23/25
I really love the aside in the last sentence that Slylock can afford the more expensive wand. He makes good money as the Forest Kingdom’s primary enforcer, OK? He absolutely can throw away $8 on a whimsically shaped bubble-making wand if he wants to. In fact, he’s tempted to do so, even though it makes the same normal spherical bubbles the cheap one makes, just to conspicuously display his access to wealth. He’s not poor, got it????
Shoe, 2/23/25
“Also when I say ‘getting married’ I mean ‘making a suicide pact.’ Six of one, half a dozen of the other, amiright? Ha ha!”
141 replies to “Elder Sunday”
Slylock Fox:
Oh, this one’s super-easy, and the kids will get it in a snap. Slylock opts for the lesser-priced wand because he’s heeded the words of veteran investor David Roche, who predicts a bear market in 2025 on account of smaller-than-expected interest rate cuts, a slowing economy and an AI bubble. So Slylock wants to save his investment dollars.
Shoe — Seems to me that old bird needs to register at the local GED English class. . .
Cranky — “OK, how about this? The supervillain Dust Man has deposited a layer of poisonous sediment on top of the shelves and we need to remove it before it can rise into the air and kill us all!
“On it, boss!”
Crankshaft: More to the point, does Spider-Janitor now need to devise a Windex-shooting device to place on his wrist, or will his body create its own super-cleaning fluid?
Slylock Fox: I assume saying “We accept Bitcoin” on the sign is a subtle way of saying that cryptocurrency itself is all one big BUBBLE — which would have been an extremely helpful and prescient thing for this comic strip to have told us two years ago!
Mary Worth: Dawn is the non-dairy ice cream of potential girlfriends — not exactly great, but really not all that bad, and you can feel good about yourself for choosing to take her off the market.
Slylock opts for the cheaper one for Max Mouse because Max isn’t worth it.
The comic implies that Slylock gets a good salary and can afford expensive stuff, while Max is being paid in trinkets and not even the pricey ones. I approve
Shoe: Suicide pact, murder-suicide, death by natural causes, at my age you’re splitting hairs.
Shoe-The Widow Palmer wants to be cremated with a blend of seven herbs and spices.
Blondie-Oh, Dagwood, stop kidding yourself. Dithers will never ever give you a bonus.
Slylock Fox-“Shady Shrew is guilty of false advertising.” That’s all the reason Slylock needs to arrest Shady and to burn his stand to the ground.
MW-“Ice cream makes everything better.” Especially the “toppings” Mary puts on the ice cream.
FC-And Thel just cleaned the floor of black lines from Billy’s return too.
Are they registered at a mortuary because he’s marrying a corpse or because the corpses are the wedding buffet? I could go either way!
CSh: Glad to see that someone is using up the vast reserve of nerd-refernce humor loaf left over from The Big Bang Theory’s run.
SFx I like how Sal just looks sheepish about the whole thing. “Jeez, that’s a pretty good scam. Wish I had thought if it…!”
Shoe On first read I thought that ‘the widow palmer’ was the nickname of some kind of geriatric pick-up artist.
C: “Why did you suddenly decide you don’t want to live in filth anymore? Were you suddenly feminised?” This depiction of a lonely male nerd with poor mental health getting radicalised into misogyny is frightfully realistic and the most accurate insight into politics in Western democracies in the comics page!
JP: so did they see Alan Parker shoot the boyfriend/husband?
RMMD: douchebag is the new Rene Belluso.
Of course this week’s Mary Worth quote is from the musical Les Misérables, rather than the novel by Victor Hugo. I’m not even going to bother quotevestigating that further.
I love that it’s not the bubble wands that are standard, but it’s Sal himself! Ehi Sal, modesty is great but maybe have some self-esteem! Excessive self-vituperation is a sign of depression!
The economics of creating shoe confused me… it now takes two to be this bad when for years Jeff pulled it off as a solo creator.
Marvin: Jenny grabs Marvin by his ankles thereby banging his head on each step as she goes upstairs.
“There! That’s how!”
I haven’t followed the folding of Funky Winkerbean characters into Crankshaft, how long after FW ended did it take Batiuk to begin physically shaking from silver-age-comic-reference withdrawal?
Crankshaft : Maybe Crazy Harry is operating under NEWSPAPER SPIDER-MAN logic, where the person who was bitten by a radioactive entity would spend all day lazing around watching TV while making their spouse do all the hard work.
…Which means that, if we’re lucky, Skunkhead John is going to get knocked unconscious by a randomly falling brick.
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Slylock Fox : the biggest problem with this strip is that I *THINK* they only have, roughly, 78 different ‘mysteries’, but since they have to run two a week, they burn through all of them really quick, and have to constantly rerun a couple of them.
Can’t wait for yet another variation on “The bad guy put the sleeping potion IN THE ICE”… Or maybe we’ll get lucky, and get the ever-amusing “Doctor Weirdly has locked Slylock Fox and Max Mouse in a room with an open refridgerator so they’ll freeze solid, but when he came back to see his handiwork, the room wasn’t any colder!” one.
Crankshaft: I was confused because I thought the Iron Man figure was a robot that could be told to do the cleaning.
I guess if you’re named “Mort,” you’re pretty much destined for some death-related field.
@Dan: I don’t read Crankshaft, but from what I’ve seen online the FW takeover of the Crankshaft strip was swift and brutal. If these two losers are now in it, I’m sure Les has been clotting up its storylines.
JP: Odd. I’ve watched every episode of Slow Horses and I can’t remember a single scene where Gary Oldman walks towards the camera eating an ice cream cone.
CS: No, if we were operating in real world logic, middle-aged Skunkhead would not expect geriatric Crazy Harry to be able to reach shelves that he couldn’t. Harry doesn’t seem to have any height advantage, and will file for workman’s comp if he falls off a ladder.
SFx: If I were Max Mouse, I would be very annoyed that Slylock felt free to restrain me by the tail willy-nilly, instead of just using his words.
And, of course, the helpless and hopeless milennial who runs garbage of this blog has to make sone long-winded statements of the elderly, when he could just say “ok, boomer” and think that was original and never get old.
FC: Thel watches Jeffy stride casually into the house and thinks; “All those goose stepping lessons went for nichts.”
@MKay: Also, I’m near certain that in an “realistic” animal society, pulling one’s tail would be considered rude at best, assault at worst.
“Where are you registered?”
“Let’s just say we cannot hold the ceremony close to a school!”
@Card: Sick burn, dude!
(Not!)
Batiuk advances the radical eugenic proposition that if you are not tall enough to reach the high shelves you should not be allowed to own a shop
Pretty sure it’s to inform children that Sky isn’t a broke boy thereby not the answer to the question posed but we’ll go with what you said because it’s curmudgeonly
SlyF – So close, but just narrowly missed the opportunity to name Pascal’s law!
@Pozzo: Well, it’s a buzzard thing. You get named “Mort” or “Todd” or something like that.
Fred Basset Spanish to English.
Slylock Fox: Years ago, I saw an episode of Arthur in which the title character and his family were in I think a gift shop, which sold square balloons. Arthur’s little sister DW asked the clerk how they got square balloons, to which the clerk responded, “Blow square breaths.” All I can think of looking at today’s strip.
Long-time lurker: So, today’s Popeye was pretty eye-opening for me. I did not know about the Bluto/Brutus weirdness, and I definitely did not know that they had an older brother Bruto, much less that Bruto was gay married. And Bluto seems pretty cool with that (except recommending violence over love). I’ve always thought Bluto would, if he weren’t such a rage-maniac jerk, get a lot of attention if he showed up in a gay bar. Wild. Is this Bruto stuff new, or is it canon?
JP: So now Sam has to travel all the way back to New York from wherever the hell Cavelton is to retrieve the drone and the recording device, and then put it all back together so it does not look like it was tampered with, and then present it to the police as maybe perhaps possibly evidence that might clear Ann. Is that the plan?
If I was cuddling up with Abby like that, there’s not a chance in hell that I’d be going anywhere.
Shoe – I hope necrophilia is not part of the wedding.
Crankshaft – He’s got a radioactive bug up his ass….
SFx – (upside down) He’s a cheap bastard….
Shoe – Oh…if you mean that online sex offender thing, she doesn’t seem to mind….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
SFx: Despite ample examples from their human forebears, the Glorious Animal Regime is still trying to figure out this marketing thing. Shady, for example, leans into false advertising to justify his overly inflated wand cost, when he could simply market the star-shaped ones as “fairy wands” to little girls, lower the cost to about $2.50, and still come out ahead. Standard Sal, meanwhile, has the advantage of being able to sell in bulk at a lower cost but rather than promoting his low prices has cultivated an air of quiet desperation, his awkward smile conveying both an overeager hope for a sale and an acknowledgement that he doesn’t deserve his customer’s patronage. He’s basically Willy Loman with floppy ears.
Shoe: I want to look up “are there any birds that kill the male after mating” but Shoe is such a black hole for interest that even my trivia-obsessed mind can’t be stirred down that rabbit hole.
Mara Llave, Marker of Time returns after a stasis of six weeks! Mara breaks the third wall to explain that the story will continue, after the creators “retool” one more time to determine how they are going to deliver the story!
I want Alex and Nickolej (definitely a couple of tools) to come over to my place dressed in a pantomime horse costume and act it out through interpretative modern dance!
I’ve always wondered how someone would be so offended by a snarky comment about their favorite strip, that they would create an account just to ride to the defense of said strip.
Did the paperboy not come today?
CS: Skunkhead gets aroused while polishing Iron Man, asks Harry to leave, and closes up shop for about an hour.
RMMD: “Well hellooooo there. Hey, ebony and ivory! Whataya say the three of us blow this pop stand and get better acquainted at my place. You won’t regret it ladies. . . . HEY, GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME! YOU CAN’T THROW ME OUT. I’M AN AMERICAN CITIZEN! I’LL HAVE YOUR JOB FOR THIS!”
SFx – I love Standard Sal’s name and facial expression. Yup, that’s me, I’m just a regular ol’ pig, down here at the market, selling my three common bubble wands so I can take my four fifty back home to my wife, Conventional Connie, and my kids, Common, Normal, Meh and Standard, Jr. in good ol’ suburban Typical Town.
Zits: In the Battle of the Bands, Jeremy’s group is going to kick Chip’s group’s ass. Jeremy Scott and Jim Borgman have achieved a verisimilitude of rock and roll, which the Walker Browne Entertainment Group cannot aspire to.
Mary Worth cannot bring herself to say the sentence “Non-dairy ice cream makes everything better!” Her honesty is refreshing.
RMMD: Summer, he’s obviously a mental health patient*. Tell him there’s no jumping the line and he needs to apply for the clinic’s services like anyone else. (*I’ve known some MSWs and can see how this arc ends.)
BG&SS: Miz Prunelly is doing the best anyone can but Jughaid and all his friends will be back for their fourth year of third grade in September.
RM MD How long will it take for the guy to come back and torch the clinic? I hope they have security cameras, although that might violate patients’ right to privacy.
9CL: After years on the brink of evaporation, Amos’s chin vanishes completely today.
DT: The missing watch is reasonable; everyone carries a phone these days so a watch is more of an ornament/status symbol than a necessity. “Missing rings” mystifies me. How many rings are they accustomed to find on a park corpse? What about bells on the toes?
FG: Schkrade really has a personal fetish for the Veronica Lake look — Dale Arden, current sexy barmaid, and several other female characters all sport the “Cyclops style,” long hair dangling over one eye. What with the lack of depth perception, you’d think the girls in this strip would spend a lot more time walking into walls and falling down staircases.
@Ukulele Ike: Mara Llave: At this point, who really cares anymore? They had a promising idea and couldn’t deliver.
Shoe – Don’t look so surprised, Roz. They’re vultures, so obviously corpses make the perfect gift!
DT: Great, RFK Jr. has taken to hunting the Most Dangerous Game.
Dustin: Unsurprisingly, Dustdad is only able to be nice by accident.
JP: “I mean it, this is absolutely, positively the VERY LAST TIME I will go out of my way to help you!”
MW: I understand that there probably wasn’t enough space in the panel for “Alain Boubil, translated by Herbert Kretzmer, inspired by the work of Victor Hugo,” but this is a highly misleading truncation to say the least. Next Karen Moy will be insisting “History has its eyes on you” is an actual George Washington quote.
Don Abundio, translated:
“Don Abundio, your sales director is here to see you”
“Not now. Just tell him to keep his eye on the ball…”
“aim to hit singles and be sure to cover all the bases”
@matt w: “This is my quest, to follow that star, no matter how hopeless, no matter how far.”
— Cervantes
MW: [Pulls string] Now let’s forget our troubles with a big bowl of strawberry ice cream!
Luann: John Krasinski? Zac Efron? Not saying those gentlemen haven’t aged gracefully, but this “19-year old” considers them ‘hotties’ in this wretched year of 2025? Did the Evansii miss deadline and this is a rerun from circa 2007?
@Rusty: Interestingly, I don’t think Les has even appeared in Crankshaft since FW was blessed cancell- er, I mean respectfully retired. I’m sure that’s only because in Batiuk’s mind Les is too pure and holy to appear in the ‘lesser’ comic.
@Cleveland Mocks: I would if I were Abby. Look at that pissy face Sam’s got on. He looks like he’s holding in a massive bowel movement that no turtleneck can contain!
It’d be nice if this was Sophie’s way of writing herself out of not just this story but the strip as a whole, but we should be so lucky.
Also, we’re NEVER going to see what the damn footage showed, are we? It’s called ‘WRITING’!!
So how does Slylock make money? Does he extort “finders fees” from the rich victims every time he tracks down a homing pigeon that is part of a jewel heist? Under the table payments from Count Weirdly to look the other way every time the count gets the urge to cross-breed snakes, bats, and robots? Or is he just on salary with Animaltopia as their designated boot grinding on the neck of the few remaining humans?
It’s all of those, isn’t it?
@Lord Flatulence: Oh, I don’t care about the story or any of the characters. At this point I’m running on morbid fascination, like staring at a blazing automobile crash.
In a world where perfectly good and amusing comic strips like My Cage and The Hots stick around for a year or two and then disappear, along with a creator’s note explains that “it just isn’t working out” and how they need to get a job driving cab or lifting cement blocks to order to “provide common groats and lentils to feed their starving family,” Mara Llave is currently re-starting itself for the FOURTH TIME IN THREE YEARS.
Schkrade rebooted Flash Gordon less than two years ago and in that time has become the most admired/respected adventure comic guy in the funny papers.
MW:
“I deserve better!
“No, you want better. You deserve a kick in the ass!“
“I deserve better!” If anything, Dawn, you deserve a lot worse.
Zits: Man, you gotta hand it to this comic – their buyin’ that Rhino package will cover our overhead costs for a month! Well, we gotta account for transportation, Rhino chow, and clean-up costs, but we’re still coming out ahead. Just look at that synchronized stomping! Poetry in motion… And yes, that’s Rompin’ Rhino in the lead position. He’s still got it.
B. Bailey throw away panels: Sarge thinks better of interrupting Beetle and Killer wrestling with a featureless cube.
Mary Worth – There’s so much that’s off with this, but I can’t get past Dawn’s half assed commitment to a vegan diet. When Dirk ordered steak for her and ordered her to eat it, she shrugged it off and ate it. Now she’s back on the vegan train. I don’t think that eating vegan works that way.
Rex Morgan – Thanks to HIPAA, Summer and Michelle can only use his first name when they throw him out of the office. Unfortunately, we still don’t know what his name is. I guess “Get out, asshole!” works.
9CL – Let me see if I understand this. Lolly is around twenty, and Alistair is either sixteen or twenty. They’re both world class musicians. They interrupt their performance to make out. Lolly’s mother smiles approvingly. Alistair is the only one who has a chin.
Get help, Brooke.
@Rusty: Les hasn’t shown up as much as Harry Dinkle, who is just as horrible.
@Sid, Agent to the Animal Stars!: I loved the Flamingos in Andertoons today. Nice work!
Crankshaft: “Atomik Komix”, gad what a pretentious effort at being…? Its not quite a phonetic conversion as C makes the same phonetic sound as K. So “Atomic Comix” makes far more sense. But no, they have to get cute with changing the Cs to Ks for no good reason! The two words juxataposed already have assonance AND consonance-for pity’s sake is that not enough?? And then they eschew parallelism by mixing “x” with “k” rather than “ks”, which is an infuriating faux rhyme. “Atomic Comics”: is there a rival shop by that name, far superior to their shady business, that they are luring illiterate customers (who buy comics for their pictures of busty heroines: “Something-X? What have we here?”) away from? Damn them and their flippant consonant swapping! I refuse to ever set foot in these miscreants’ proprietorship!
Slylock buys a wand from Sal, and then bends it into the shape of Shady Shrew. Then he arrests Shady on the charge of fraudulently pretending to make bubbles that look like himself. It’s always Shady Shrew.
I appreciate that the bird refers to his fiancée as “the Widow Palmer” instead of “Betty-Lou” or whatever her first name is and I hope this continues throughout their marriage because I can’t think of anything funnier to cry out in orgasmic joy.
Shoe: Biz’s use of the phrase “Widow Palmer” is because he’s embarrassed to admit it’s really Rosie Palmer and her five sisters. Or however many sisters a bird’s palm has. Hm, maybe Rosie is enough by herself, given that it’s a cloaca we’re talking about here.
The Animal Kingdom might be a brutal police state, but even Slylock is not putting someone in prison for a 8 bucks fraud! He’s simply saving his own money and let Shady do his thing
@The Quiet Man: : re-CS: Les has appeared in Crankshaft, shortly after last Labor Day. It was the book burning-censorship story, Batiuk’s hail Mary play for that elusive Pulitzer.
@I speak Jive: Unfortunately, we still don’t know what his name is.. Guy Hornee? Dopey McChinbeard? Ivan Nottaclue?
PV: Hmmmmm, Morgan forgot to wear a bra today.
Hooray for historical accuracy.
Mara Llave, Waster of Time: Are you f-ng kidding me?
Prediction: Mara returns in six months as Pigborn.
I wonder how many cowardly publishers dropped today’s Doonesbury strip.
Phantom: off-panel, the wait for the matchlock took so long that Stripey just yelled “stop” and the kidnapper actually stopped and got whapped in the head with the gun. (It also resolved editor complaints about the blood and violence in recent strips).
Aw.
I missed Comment #69.
Crankshaft: There is NO way whatsoever that Batiuk got permission to use the actual designs for all the superhero stuff in this. He’s probably just gambling that nobody at DC or Marvel’s legal teams even know his comic exists, which is actually a pretty fair assumption.
Slylock Fox: Why are Slylock and Max acting like a father and child in this strip? Isn’t Max supposed to be a fellow cop? Do police officers usually take time off in the middle of work to buy each other bubble blowers?
@BigTed: Mary Worth: Dawn is the non-dairy ice cream of potential girlfriends — not exactly great, but really not all that bad, and you can feel good about yourself for choosing to take her off the market
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Ben & Jerry will package and market her as Life Is Fruit-all™ Tutti Frutti.
@Garrison Skunk: Be sure to try the whole line of Mary Worth inspired Ben & Jerry flavors! Mary’s Meddling Mudslide™, Ian’s Chinbeard Coconut Flake™,Willburp’s Hamburger Heaven™, Tobe’s To be or Not To Be Vanilla™, Dirk Tandy’s Abusive Orange™ and Charterstone Cookies & Salmon Bits™
MW: The way that Dawn and Dirk’s relationship was handled is that most abusers don’t act like belligerent bullies that put their obnoxious behavior on display for everyone to see. They put on a mask in public so that they appear superficially charming which makes it harder for their victims to seek help because they don’t see the nice guy as a horrible person.
Ironically, abusers act more like how Wilbur did when he was dating Estelle and treating her like she was a consolation prize when he wanted Iris. He monopolized her attention, walked all over her, threatened to harm her cat for taking attention away from him, and constantly inserted himself into situations where she couldn’t get away from him. Add in the fact that Mary enabled him and contributed to the gaslighting by more or less forcing Estelle to stay with Wilbur and you have a situation that feels a lot more like a domestic abuse than whatever the hell they tried to do with Dirk the Dick.
@ectojazzmage: Slylock Fox: Why are Slylock and Max acting like a father and child in this strip?
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No one found it strange when a Vampiress and a Frankenstein’s Monster produced a Werewolf child on the Munsters, So maybe Max is the love child of a fox and A cat, here. Freakier things have happened in this strip.
Crankshaft-“No but I was blown by a cleaning lady.”
PV: Val’s going begging to Morgan again, cap in hand? I guess she can sit on any damn chair she wants.
Final panel: Ingrid ate those ravens, grilled over an open fire with fresh rosemary and a squeeze of lemon.
Pearls Before Swine Spanish to English,
SFx: “Slylock isn’t a bad friend because he’s a cheapskate; he just doesn’t want to give Max anything more than a Happy Meal because Max never finishes his fries!”
Six Chex And A Cat Who Thinks He’s Lloyd Bridges In Search Of A Punchline: Why is the Omitted Opening Pronouns Convention being held under water?
Cranky’s Wrath :”This strip’s gone from Clean to Suck!”- President Skroob (Adapted)
@Needless Exposition: Max never finishes his fries!”
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Rachel Rabbit keeps stealing them.
@Guillermo el chiclero: He did? Dang, that just flew right past me. Must have been because (for some inexplicable reason) Les didn’t make the situation all about him and how everyone should feel sorry for him because his wife died of cancer as a result of medical malpractice.
Maybe if Lillian had made him the dominant partner in the clubho- I mean, legitimate bookstore, I would have remembered him better.
@pugfuggly: CSh: Glad to see that someone is using up the vast reserve of nerd-refernce humor loaf left over from The Big Bang Theory’s run.
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Wait till you see “Young Crankshaft”
@Ukulele Ike: #76: Not only that, Morgan can saw a hole in the seat of Arthur’s throne, take an enormous dump, and make Val perform the office of keeper of the royal stool.
@matt w: NGL, I had a little bit of a She-Hulk rage-out when I read that. As a gigantic fan of both book AND musical, I hate that shit. It’s a beautiful lyric and one of which I’m sure Hugo would heartily approve, but let’s give Boublil-Kretzmer their due and also not spread misinformation, hmmmm? (Same goes for “To love another person is to see the face of God”. If I see one more Etsy mug with that and “Victor Hugo” emblazoned on it, imma have an aneurysm.)
Hey, while I’m ranting: my favorite scene in Ted Lasso was also ruined for me by Ted unnecessarily attributing “Be curious, not judgmental” to Walt Whitman. It’s a perfectly lovely sentiment on its own! You don’t need to boost its legitimacy by falsely attributing and therefore putting another wellspring of misinformation out there! Gaaaaaaaahhhhh!
Deep breaths, Moll-Hulk. Sun’s getting real low.
@ectojazzmage: Re: Slylock Fox: I dunno if “sugar daddy/kept mouse” really counts as a “Father/son” relationship….
@Garrison Skunk: #83: How about “Pam and Jeff’s First Marriage”?
Crankshaft:
Green shirt over black shirt, comic book store, that posture as he vacuums…Really thought I was looking at retirement-age Mopey Pete.
Crank: I could be wrong, but I think this is the first post-Funky strip that doesn’t even pretend to be about Crankshaft characters (previous trips to the Komix Korner had Jeff hanging around, and I reluctantly count Dinkle as a Crankshaft character because he transferred over while both strips were running). I’m revising my timetable for how long it’s going to take for the strip to be renamed Crankshaft and Les Moore and Ed to get Barney Googled.
EC: I know gag strips with storylines often have this thing where the Sunday is disconnected, but rarely as disconnected as the Ardins complaining everyone else is going on vacation and they’re not, immediately after a trip to a B&B.
FC: If Flashback Thel has her original hair, give Flashback Bil his original model as well, you cowards!
HtH: Better question: Why did you come to this small Viking hamlet after spending your entire life in capital cities? Oh, right, because capitals are the the only European locations the creative team knows.
(Yes, alright, Madrid wasn’t a capital in the Viking age, and unlike some people, I know and aknowledge when my jokes are anachronistic.)
MW: Dawn, could you maybe drop the “I tried so hard to make it work” aspect? Because I really feel like you still think that sometimes you meet a guy who controls what you eat and calls you demeaning names, and it just takes a bit of effort to get past that! You shouldn’t have been trying so hard to make it work!
OBH: Given how long Alice has been public domain, how old is Non-Tacky Tales and its story A Little Girl’s Non-Copyright Infringing Adventures in a Land of Wonder?
SFx: I always say it’s a sign of a good con if your marks could easily learn the truth before getting more than five steps away from you. Shady’s lucky that cat is too busy staring at the wand in rapture to actually try it out.
@TheDiva: @matt w: Ugh, I think I hate that sort of thing even more than attributions that are just wrong. I got extremely annoyed recently when a BBC radio series about children’s books tried to claim A. A. Milne was responsible for the line “You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think,” which is from the Disney movie Pooh’s Grand Adventure.
JP:. Poor Soph. We know that after making a healthy, strong, self-affirming statement like that the next two arcs will require her to go groveling back to Sam and Abbs for their help. “We’re family and we always help one another. Even if it kills us. You’re stuck, kid.”
MW: Mary doesn’t seem all that interested in this relationship postmortem. She seems more interested these days in not eating alone. Wouldn’t a story line with Mary and her Visiting Angels caregiver be as interesting?
@Stacker: I feel like Mary’s thrall dissipates in the presence of people who don’t live in Charterstone so it’s why we haven’t been seeing anyone new since Keith who also became influenced by Charterstone.
@Stacker: Mary can always invite Mr. Allora over for dinner when she gets lonely. Of course, he’d need to eat in the kitchen, but they could carry on a nice shouty conversation between rooms.
MW:. Just reading Kane Brown’s lyrics to “Gotta Be Like That” about relationship addiction. Ice cream might help, but Dawn could use therapy to first become her own strong person, independent of a relationship.
@Activist: With Weston genes and Mary’s talons digging in, being a shallow flake is the best that Dawn can hope for. Keep in mind that Dawn thinks that her dad is her hero and we’re not talking about sandwiches.
@Needless Exposition: Also keep in mind, that Dawn had a nightmare of physically becoming him.
@TheDiva: #49:
@matt w: #12:
@Horace Broon: #90:
My favorite hate misquote is when someone rattles off, As Shakespeare said, “Let’s kill all the lawyers!”. No, idiot. It’s said by a character in one of his plays, who was a rebel and a lunatic.
@The Rambling Otter: Oh, I remember. Then she left fake New England to go to real New England and said that her mom was a total bitch who didn’t like her (no surprise) so she immediately changed her mind from “I don’t want to be like my dad” to “My daddy is so great, he’s my hero!”
I’ll bet you anything that Dawn tried to be her “charming” self and threw a tantrum when her mom shut her down.
Why doesn’t Slylock let Max make his own bad decisions? It’s his money, Slylock! Let him blow it on the star bubble wand!
In Crankshaft, this “John” character – the top of his hair, where it’s long or shaggy or whatever it’s doing, is dyed black and the lower part is natural white, correct? And if you saw somebody like this in real life you’d understand they were either a young punk or an old person with no one in their life to tell them that their dye job is terrible, right?
Also, re: Slylock Fox, what exactly is his relationship with Max and how old is Max, again?
Pluggers – OMG! They killed the animal on the cover of Put Me in the Zoo and turned his hide into a bedspread!
@102 Peanut Gallery:
You either have an incredible memory or you have small kids around.
I wonder if the plugger can pull the spots off the bedspread and juggle them.
@Guillermo el chiclero: I always stick to good ol’ Charles Dickens: “The law is a ass — a idiot.”
@Needless Exposition: I like to think Dawn got thrown out of Connecticut for cheating at croquet, or drinking the fingerbowl.
@JeffMcm: Skunkhead John has Reed Richards disease, and a bad haircut.
@Sequitur: I have a pretty good memory for books I read when I was a kid. But I forgot he could do all those things with his spots.
CRANKSHAFT: That is one of the saddest and feeblest attempts at a joke that I have ever seen in CRANKSHAFT. And I have been following CRANKSHAFT since I was bitten decades ago by a radioactive band director.
C-Shaft: It seems like Skunkhead should be able to write a stepladder off as a business expense? And that way he wouldn’t have to rely on the presence of Crazy Harry, who we’re meant to believe is extraordinarily tall.
SFx: Still and all, Standard Sal is terrible at branding, as evidenced by his calling himself “Standard Sal.” If he wants to make it he needs to partner with somebody like Shady, and of course institute a lethal zero tolerance policy for embezzlement.
9CL: The strip that did so much to popularize the term “brain bleach” can still make you reach for it all these years later.
DT: The jogger who found the body waited for over an hour afterwards to hear the Law & Order “dun-dun” sound.
Dustin: I was sure she was going to say, “Oh, not for me, silly.”
FC: If Thel wants to look on the bright side she can reflect that she has a much more flattering hairstyle than Archive Thel. The hausfrau Louise Brooks look might be good for some women but doesn’t work for her.
JP: This Columbo reboot where Orlando Bloom plays the good lieutenant and licks ice cream cones instead of smoking cigars doesn’t look like it’s going to fly but I could be wrong.
MW: “Thanks for dinner, Mary. It looked to be crustless French toast but I guess that’s dinner now? And vegan, somehow? If Karen Moy says so.”
RMMD: Good for Summer that—unlike a certain young Charterstone denizen—she’s not susceptible to this kind of nonexistent charm. That said, can we move on?
@JeffMcm: Both Reed Richards and Dr. Strange have been depicted with streaks of white in their hair. I imagine that John is under the impression this makes him look more Marvelicious.
@ValdVin: And Jerry Scott brings a similar verisimilitude to elementary school band trombone practice in baby Blues. Both illustrators got to have fun and I’m happy for them.
MW: Ice cream makes EVERYTHING better.
Non-Dairy ice cream, however…
@Ukulele Ike: You still bother with that?
@105 Peanut Gallery:
When I was a tween in the early ’60s I read that book and many like it to my kid sister.
@112 richardf8:
Go ahead. See for yourself
I hope you like red.
@The Rambling Otter: Keep in my that Dawn’s “loving mother” told her chubby, bespectacled daughter that she has Wilbur’s “ugly genes, so maybe that fear is simply literal.
@I speak Jive: Give Mary some credit. Last she knew, Dawn was vegan. Now if Dirk had texted Mary to tell her that Dawn will it meat if it is served to her, we could have gotten back to the lengthy consumption of Ted the Muffin Man in various braised dishes with Fava Beans and a fine Chianti.
@116 richardf8:
I thought Dawn likeds pork or likes to be porked. I forget which.
Well, if newspaper Spiderman taught us anything, that bite will give him the ability to watch TV, whine, and fail at all things. So he’ll probably need cleaning help.
@Sequitur:
#114. ML:. Also keep checking back to see if Mara is new. Glad she explained today and gave us hope she might return after dispute with publisher cools off
6CX:. Note the lack of subject pronouns? Usually inferred and often redundant, no? Think as kids we were taught it was self-centered to begin a piece with first person, just as it was vain to vote for yourself in an election.
@Sequitur: So they brought Ann Telnaes on as a colorist? She can do animation work too. She even worked for The Mouse.
@richardf8: See my comment at #54.
@Sequitur: Yeah, what’s with the 3-color art in a Sunday comic, for god’s sake? They won’t pony up the $15 for the Lower Slobbovian colorist team?
@Artist formerly known as Ben: Your annual reminder that, before Brooke packed their trunks and moved the cast to the upper west side of Manhattan, 9CL was witty, intelligent and fun to read.
@Artist formerly known as Ben: “Eggs are vegan, right?”
@Ukulele Ike: I actually do remember (some of) that. The characters were drawn from a certain artsy elite, but that could be read as admirable specificity. The humor was fussy–the kind of thing that Niles Crane would appreciate–but was identifiable as humor and often worked. Something happened, I don’t know what.
@Artist formerly known as Ben: “….The humor was fussy–the kind of thing that Niles Crane would appreciate….”
As a bit of a toff and intellectual snob — no, no, pray don’t contradict me — I appreciated that style of humor, which is rare on the comics page. They danced ballet and played musical instruments, but there was none of this “world-class” horse shit. And the Unicorn fucking ruined it.
Even Juliette’s leopard-print underpants were funny, and lacked the current Ick Factor.
@Artist formerly known as Ben:
#109:. CS: I’d always assumed it was due to an ill-fitting rug. Good to hear John’s sense of style is intentional.
@Ukulele Ike: Yeah, I’m just noting that black brush work with red washes is Ann Telnaes’ style, so when I went to Mara Llave and saw the color palette, I thought of Telnaes.
IOW
<Foghorn Leghorn>
That was snark, son.
</Foghorn Leghorn>
@Peanut Gallery: Heh, I still remember in one of the Megaman videogames, one of the protagonist’s friends had a Pikachu-skin rug in her house.
@Peanut Gallery: Also, that totally looks like a Dr. Seuss book. (Doesn’t help that The Cat in the Hat is in the upper right corner)
Although I’m probably subconsciously mixing this book up with Seuss’s book “If I ran the zoo”
@Sequitur: Go ahead. See for yourself
What news do you have about Pibgorn?
@Activist: it was self-centered to begin a piece with first person
One must agree.
PV: Ingrid, you really need to learn how to deploy a good effective poker face. That’s more important than whatever you’ve done with the ravens, although if you did anything bad to them, some of us will definitely not be happy with you, and by some of us, I mean me.
I can’t believe nobody has commented on today’s Hi and Lois storyline about Ditto taking a shit and clogging the toilet and then attempting to suck it all out with the family vacuum cleaner they have owned since 1960.
GA: Instead of telling Slim that he really needs to visit a sleep clinic and will probably end up with a CPAP, Clovia decides to murder him. I, for one, loudly applaud this better-late-than-never choice.
@128 Abomynous:
I don’t follow Pibgorn or 9 Chickweed Lane but I thought I’d do a bit of research. Here is the consensus on Pibgorn.
I have no idea what these health issues are and why they do not apply to 9 Chickweed Lane.
@132 Poteet:
That is a horrendous conclusion.
Slylock: While the answer seems clever on paper…
1- Police still have to announce themselves before coming in. Well, human police anyway.
2- Does it matter if he hears the police cruiser doors close? Could be anyone’s car parking on the street. A neighbour perhaps?
The answer relies on Reeky being very paranoid.
@135 The Rambling Otter:
Electric car!
@Sequitur: A horrendous conclusion for Slim, a horrendous conclusion by me, or both? (Mwahaha.)
MW: If Dirk were to come back, bearing flowers, false apologies, and fake shame, Dawn would surely take him back, starting a cycle of abuse, separation, apology, reconciliation and abuse. He’s found someone who will take certain amount of abuse and whose self-esteem is low enough that she’ll accept his apology with gratitude.
@137 Poteet:
I think the whole idea is very ghastly.
@Sequitur: Sorry. But it was Clovia’s idea, and from the crazed look in her eyes, getting an apology out of her seems unlikely.
Slylock – you know … they *do* actually sell bubble wands in fun shapes like that. In real life. I have kids, we had some.
Yes, the bubbles ultimately come out round, but they do look kind of cool and weird *while* they are being made.
Just sayin’ – has Slylock ever met a kid? Or a toy?