Please do not peck my eyes out, bird lovers, you are valid
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Crock, 11/9/25

Now, obviously part of the whole deal of Crock is that it takes what’s objectively a pretty grim situation — a remote outpost of an army engaged in a grinding colonial war that we know with the hindsight of history that they’re going to lose — and uses it as a setting for a mostly light-hearted and zany series of comical vignettes. Still, sometimes the grim seeps through more than others, and you gotta admit that “angry troops attempt to lynch their commanding officer, only for him to trick them into falling to their deaths in turn, leaving him alone to wander the desert” is one of those times.
Hagar the Horrible, 11/9/25

Now, you may wonder why Hagar, who seems well aware that his years as a notorious pillager have created a very lucrative brand, doesn’t simply cut out the middleman: instead of letting the Duke of York profit by association and then stealing said profits, why doesn’t Hagar simply charge visitors to his own village, go on a highly paid speaking tour, and publish Horrible, and Profitable: What Today’s Leaders Can Learn From My Years Of Terror Around The North Sea Littoral, which will be bought by CEOs at airport bookstores everywhere and handed over to their assistants to summarize? But Hagar is savvy enough to understand that his brand wouldn’t survive any such attempt to “go legit,” so any profit he’d gain from such a move would be fleeting. Plus he can’t read, so the book thing probably hasn’t even occurred to him.
Mary Worth, 11/9/25

No offense to David Attenborough, but I’ve never really cared for birds. Like, I guess I don’t dislike them, and of course they’re beautiful to look at, but I’ve always found them off-putting up close — they just seem clearly further away from us, evolution-wise, than cats and dogs, and looking into their eyes they always feel kind of alien to me. The fact that they’re actually quite intelligent just adds to my unease. So, no shade on the many fine people who are bird lovers out there, but I’m just saying that for me personally, if a parrot I had encountered outside had figured out where I lived and begun rapping on the windows demanding to be let in, I would not be quite as enthusiastic about it as Toby is here.
Hi and Lois, 11/9/25

I really love Hi’s quick three-panel transition from triumph to anxiety to crushing depression. Honestly, the final panel with the “punchline” is completely unnecessary and even detracts from things a little bit.
Crankshaft, 11/9/25

The name of this painting is of course a Crankshaft-level bit of awful wordplay, which is why it’s great that he looks so horrified. “Oh god, I talk like this, don’t I? Why haven’t they murdered me in my sleep?”


45 replies to “Please do not peck my eyes out, bird lovers, you are valid”
MW: Is the bird tapping on the window, or saying “tap tap”? Someone noted MW‘s unusual use of narration boxes for animal sounds, and this just adds to the confusion.
Crankshaft-They’ve tried murdering Crankshaft it just doesn’t stick.
Slylock Fox-Because why should Slylock believe Count Weirdly even though Weirdly is clearly innocent.
MW-What’s the matter? Did Wilbur make a public ass of himself again?
FC-After riding a bus driven by Ed Crankshaft the quicker you get home the better.
The phrase “famous Norwegian Viking” bothers me. As opposed to what — the Spanish kind?
MW: The parrot painfully lands on Toby’s boobs.
“Hey, it was the only bust I could find CHIRP!“
Dick Tracy adds to the confusion over the sequence of timing and events, with “As a doctor you knew where to stab” — carefully placed so he’d live long enough to set up his cypher, but be unable to call for help? — and the knight checkmating the king, which suggests he did make up and write the whole game, or there was an (un)lucky coincidence. I guess we can’t complain about a lack of mysteries in this Minit Mystery.
HTH: I don’t get what the throwaway panels are meant to convey, unless there’s no joke and this is just a harrowing look at life after severe Viking-induced memory loss.
H&L: I genuinely think the migrating geese are a nice artistic touch. Really elevates the melancholy to the level of a Japanese haiku about the transience of seasons and human lives.
MW: Again I say, good grief, Blondie! He *said* he was getting *offered* big money. I don’t remember him showing you any cancelled checks with lots of zeros or other documentation of this so-called ‘bidding war’. Augie may have a bit more class and patience than your stalker, but he’s still a sleaze waiting to break you down mentally before he springs the question of you doing some unspeakable sexual act with/for/to him in exchange for keeping you around to enjoy this ‘big money’.
Luann: What do you do when you can’t think of something funny? Draw your two main characters sitting on their asses sniping at each other. That always pleases your readers!
You know, Evansii, you could have drawn something about that new foster dog pissing on the shoes of and/or leaving welcome gifts for our other four airheads. Now *that* would have been funny!
Mary Worth: Yeah, feed the parrot what you eat. Just what Charterstone needs, a yellow-headed dimbulb bird. I mean, another one besides Toby.
Crock: And by hanging they mean strangle since there’s nothing to hang him from. Normally, this kind of sloppy writing would bother me but maybe poor elocution is part of the joke.
@The Quiet Man:
Evans doesn’t advance the weekly story on Sunday because not every paper carries the Sunday strip.
HtH: If they opened a Viking version of Williamsburg, I’d go to that.
H&L: It would be funnier if all the neighbors were shown sneaking their leaves into the Flagstons’ yard every night.
RMMD: Is Summer “Oh I don’t know just uncomfortable ” because she feels used, or because she’s afraid Augie won’t give her a finders fee?
MW: Toby finds Sunny’s conversation vastly superior to Ian’s until the birdsplaining starts.
Crankshaft: “Round up the kids in detention, we’re taking them to The Museum of Art Puns to suffer.”
@Liam: Whoa, that nightmarish Slylock Fox shows the animapocalypse is far from over, and they sometimes mob one of the few remaining human survivors. Once they’re all gone — well, Bonobo Bill might want to keep a go-bag packed and ready.
CS: Newly literate Crank realizes he’s been calling them ‘Greathounds’ all this time and is further confused by their link to ancient Greeks.
@The Quiet Man:
On Luann :
1) I’m personally confused because I could have SWORN this strip WANTS to do wacky, off-the-wall stuff all the time, and also have the characters in
sexywacky costumes (it’s why they keep bringing Bets back after writing her out of the strip all the time), but then, we had a two-week dream sequence that was almost entirely low-effort stick figures. AND it was a riff on a story that’s usually the perfect pretext to have the non-dreaming characters show up in wacky costumes! (why DIDN’T Bernice and Luann have companions on their journey to see the Wizard?)This could have become a strip about the zany misadventures of a girl attending clown school in Italy, but I feel if the strip had picked up on that plot thread, it would have lead to it just being an excuse to write Luann out of her own strip, and we’d be stuck with Gunther and Les doing the Bernice/Luann bit instead.2) Nah, Dash is not allowed to give Dez a hard time, because then a) Dez would be shown as being faillible; b) Steffi/Tiffany/Bets can throw back “this was YOUR idea, we told you ‘NO’ ” in Dez’s face AND BE RIGHT.
LIke, maybe Dash is going to mess with Steffi/Tiffany/Bets’ stuff (possibly right after they coo about how cute he is and how much they love him), they’ll get super-angry, and Dez will lecture them about having saintly patience like her or something.
… As always, too many words about freakin’ Luann…Crock: “It’s grumble time” I.love how serious he looks when delivering that line. Don’t interrupt! Important grumbling going on!
MW Well, the internet tells me that parrots do enjoy fresh fruit and vegetables, which is good for Sunny, but bad for me, as i was really hoping that ‘Toby unwittingly kills a bird’ was the next storyline. Still could happen!
Don’t go hot air ballooning with Mary, Toby. Sunny ain’t gonna come looking for you.
MW: Now we’ve moved on to telepathic birds.
Of course you couldn’t come up with something funny every day Bernice. Who would want to read a comic strip written by a rude, snide, frigid, hateful buzzkill like you.
If Bernice did come up with her own comic strip everyday would be about her insulting the mentally handicapped girl she always hangs out with.
Crank: Is that Mopey Pete in drag?
MW: This is a continuation of the psychic animals plot– the parrot has learned to mind control weak-willed humans. Today Toby, tomorrow Wilbur, and then the world!
@Lord Flatulence:
Crank: Is that Mopey Pete in drag?
It LOOKS like it, but I *think* it’s the generic nameless schoolteacher character that’s there during “Crankshaft takes a bunch of kids on a field trip” storyline.
I forget when the last time we saw her was; not just how long ago it was, but whether it was during yet another “Crankshaft destroys all the ice sculptures of the city’s winter festival before anyone has a chance to see them”, or if it was that time all the kids on Crankshaft’s bus went “What the hell!? I could have *SWORN* I had a candy bar in my lunchbox when I went into the museum, and now that I’m back on the bus it’s GONE!” and it shows Crankshaft gorging himself on the stolen candy bars going “What? Waiting in the bus all day made me hungry!”.
Sunday morning, time for JUNGLE JIM!
I am the very model of a Viking who is horrible
I’m most uncouth, to tell the truth, my odor is intol’rable
I earn my gold by violence, like any heavy hitter will
I terrorize and pillage all around the North Sea littoral
MW – I see that Toby has a stalker now too!
Shouldn’t the Dorian Greyhound depict a real uggo? I guess somewhere in the Funkiverse is a canine Ned Flanders.
We are such social animals that anyone deprived of human companionship will slowly go insane, even if the human who’s companionship they’re deprived of is Ian Cameron.
*whose. bah
Fred Basset Spanish to English.
HtH: Hey, Hagar fans. He’s standing right there. Go get his autograph.
The joke in this Crankshaft would sort of work if it was a painting of an old, ugly dog, and Crankshaft was looking, alarmed, at a cute puppy in the foreground. But following through on a joke isn’t really Crankshaft’s vibe, they’ve made the pun, we’re done here.
@Hibbleton: Understood, but I consider that irrelevant because a creative with actual talent could come up with gags involving the story that are non-essential to moving the plot forward so the audience doesn’t miss crucial plot points and it doesn’t look like they just decided to throw some crap at the audience and call it a day.
@Anonymous: Indeed, but all those words show that you are more creative than the Evansii at crafting engaging stories that involve actual drama and humor that readers might actually find some relationship to. When was the last time any of us here spent a day just lazing in our bedroom with someone who clearly has nothing but contempt for us?
@Emily Riposte: If that bird tried to control Wilbur’s mind, one look at Mayo-Man’s subconscious and it would fly straight into the nearest running jet engine.
Can someone explain Lio? What are the things in the tub and how will they cause future enjoyment? Where is this taking place, an art gallery?
Crock: I’m going to take a reasonable guess “It’s grumble time” is a reference to the culturally relevant “It’s Hammer time.”
MW: Quoth the parrot, “Never here.”
HnL: The writers should know better than to put a sucking void inside a sucking void.
CS: Batiuk is no Oscar Wild Dog.
Crock: Running off a cliff to their deaths is pretty stupid, but how can we make them stupider? Well, instead of running around the rock, suppose they run straight over it? And even though the tracks show them running single-file, no one was able to stop short as the troops in front of him went over.
This is Moy’s big chance to escape the strip and leave it a flaming wreck in her wake. The parrot starts telling Toby secrets about her friends and neighbors… “Ian’s not at a conference, he’s at the Motel 6 out on the interstate with one of his students…”, “Wilbur is getting a bit too into those fish, if you catch my drift…”. Toby’s fragile hold on sanity will lead to merry hijinks and buckets of blood. The grand finale game of cat and mouse between a knife-wielding Toby and Mary armed only with day-old muffins will be whispered about in the darkest of corners at comics conventions for decades.
Crankshaft: Interestingly (or coincidentally) today is “Go to an art museum day”
I don’t want to give Batiuk credit on this, so I’m going with coincidence.
FC: Those ADHD meds seems to have worked.
Dustin: Awww, another heartwarming vignette about how marriage sucks. Dustin is so much better than Hi and Lois at making me want to continue living.
Luann: Good question.
9CL: And she was never seen again. Please?
The parrot, like all birds, is of course a government surveillance drone sent to spy on ordinary hard-working Americans. But after four miserable days wasted monitoring Toby, the government will shut down its program in disgust and replace all its drones with actual birds. Thanks from a grateful nation, Toby!
@Harmless little bunny: Looks like his home’s bathroom, that’s his dad looking to use the tub. The gag is maybe the juxtaposition of a normal way to announce block-off areas with the abnormal reason of letting his eldritch friends have a bath… but I don’t think any “improvements” are intended to happen.
@Harmless little bunny: I think those are frogs, because Lio likes frogs, and the rest of the business is about Lio using his official-looking clipboard and sign to appropriate the bathtub for his frogs. But this is not the most easily comprehensible Lio strip.
MW How indeed *did* the parrot find the correct window after following Toby but losing her after she entered the building? Either we’re dealing with love-homing-telepathy spreading like an infection from Olive’s Ground Zero incident with max and Greta, or there’s a building full of annoyed residents who have been trying to ignore pecked windows for the last half hour.
JP Is Charlotte a stand-in for all the grumbling readers noting dropped plotlines? I wonder just how many plot holes they’ll paper over… odds on Norway making any sense by the end of this is still a bajillion to one.
MW: Well, so much for Chekov’s sunflower seed bag – our Star didn’t get trapped or injured. It’s not that kind of story, folks, and Pauley (as Sunny) knows his way around a snack-pak. There is still the matter of Toby’s littering, however…
I’m afraid they rejected our story idea of Sunny being an undercover agent for the Park Service, helping bring litterers to justice. He’d collect the discarded packages and take them to the lab for DNA an@lysis. It was wacky, yet socially conscious… coulda been a big hit. But their legal killjoys decided his panhandling for snacks was too close to entrapment and nixed the idea. But they did keep some of the elements – he’s a skilled investigator with superior tracking abilities.
Don’t worry about any conflict with the Doves o’ Love. Everyone’s a professional here, and will show the utmost in courtesy and respect. Unless the script calls for conflict, and then you’ll know it’s ACTING! Anyway, the DOL don’t hang out much at Ian and Toby’s window…
Needless to say I love today’s Hi and Lois. Love love love it. “Hi’s quick three-panel transition from triumph to anxiety to crushing depression”? Put it in my veeeiiiiins! But as a faithful Flaghead, they did so many strips about raking leaves over the last few weeks that I was literally begging them to go back to golf.
(As far as my other bit goes, Sunday Mary Worth quote confirmed, though of course Attenborough wasn’t the first person to say that.)
HtH – If he wanted a shorter title for his book, he could simply call it It Takes a Pillage.