The Comics Curmudgeon

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Comment of the Week

YES! The grueling, meaningless life uneventful!! That's the ticket!!!

—Dennis Jimenez
166

Some might say the mythological Icarus loved the joy of flying a little too much

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Archie, 5/22/25

I dunno, Jughead, that looks more like blood to me. Presumably the LORD will be passing through to smite all those who harbor Archie in their house, and Mr. Lodge is making it clear that He should pass over the Lodge mansion, as it is Archie-free. Bad luck for Archie’s parents, I guess.

Dick Tracy, 5/22/25

“Dick Tracy” is kind of a funny name, but I think that if the comic strip didn’t exist and you were introduced to someone by that name, it wouldn’t cause you to pause and repeat it back with an “um” before it, like you think it’s weird. Especially if your name is “Icarus Lovejoy”! C’mon, man! Icarus Lovejoy!

B.C., 5/22/25

I can’t believe Johnny Hart’s heirs have allowed mention of the metric system in his beloved comic strip. I don’t care if you need to use “meter” to make the Fast and Furious wordplay work! We all know the metric system is the thin edge of the wedge of tyrannical one-world government and must be stopped at all costs.

145

Are his wish-granting capabilities all sunflower-focused

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Heathcliff, 5/21/25

Real heads who read Heathcliff daily know that most weeks have a theme of some sort — “dirt week”, “garbage week”, and so forth. This week is “sunflower week,” and the way it’s unfolded is a pretty good demonstration of how the current delightfully deranged iteration of Heathcliff works. Monday’s panel was pretty normal, all things considered: Heathcliff and a baseball manager are sitting in a dugout, Heathcliff is spitting sunflower seeds the way baseball players do, there are a bunch of very tall sunflowers (normal sunflowers without human faces, mind you) growing in the dugout, taking up most of the room, and the manager says “No more chewing sunflower seeds.” You could see a version of this as a New Yorker cartoon. But things have escalated: today Heathcliff is standing in the outfield, summoning a grinning, sunglasses-wearing spirit, the so-called “Genie of the Sunflower Seeds,” from his snack packet. And it’s only Wednesday! Imagine how much weirder this could potentially get!

Mary Worth, 5/21/25

Is it, Belle? Is it cute that Wilbur is admitting, right in front of Willa, that originally he liked Stellan better, and now considers Willa his “best little buddy” only because Stellan died? Because I don’t think that’s cute at all, actually. I think it’s pretty fucked up.

The Phantom, 5/21/25

Some might criticize the continuity strips for their glacial pacing, especially strips that are supposed to be about superheroic action. But if The Phantom were fast-paced, could it afford to spend an entire strip on Kit’s erotic reverie? That’s not a tradeoff I’m willing to make!

179

Sitcom-adjacent jokes

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/20/25

On Sunday, June got the mail, and told her sons that the family had gotten a wedding invite, and they were like “You get free cake at a wedding! That’s the reward for sitting through the boring parts!” Then yesterday and today, she also told Rex about the invite, and he gave the exact same response. This would’ve been a perfectly serviceable bit if it had played out over a minute or so in a sitcom, but it works significantly less well in a continuity strip, where it takes three days and at the end you have to remind people what happened over the previous two days, in case they never read those strips, or just forgot about them.

Luann, 5/20/25

“Sassy old lady” is also a hoary sitcom trope, and I probably shouldn’t get as much amusement from it as I do, but you have to admit it works particularly well in Luann, when the sassy old lady quips are generally along the lines of “Hey why don’t you loser kids shut the fuck up for once in your extremely overthought lives, huh? Let’s have some tea.”

Crankshaft, 5/20/25

Look, buddy, this lady works at a florist shop, so I agree that she should not just repeat the name of the flower you named back at you as a question, but should rather let you know if they have them available and how much they would cost if they do. However, I do not think taking her question as an opportunity to launch into a meandering soliloquy about times gone by is going to speed up this transaction. Quite the opposite, in fact!