Post Content

Click the banner to contribute to the Comics Curmudgeon. Details here.

Kick off your Fourth with an independent contribution to the Comics Curmudgeon!

Dick Tracy, 7/4/18

Citizen! Share your Fourth of July with this steel-jawed law enforcer, literal red-headed stepchild, and alien halfbreed, arrayed before a monochrome American flag! Comply!

Crankshaft, 7/4/18

All week long, Ralph has been flirting with both myocardial infarction and Sandy here, to the dulcet strains of jazz classic I Can’t Get Started — doubly ironic because even if he does, there remains the matter of finishing.

P.S. In California we have fires, and our air really does look like that. I don’t know Ohio’s excuse.

Mary Worth, 7/4/18

Tommy and Brandy emerge from some kind of hostage drama, and the foreshadowing is thick: Tommy will demand sex on threat of murder, and Brandy will gladly opt for death: “Humanity, schumanity — a girl’s got to have standards!”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/4/18

Every year around this time I become insufferable on the subject of fireworks. Growing up, we had the good, real kind — the ones that fly, flash, and most of all explode. I once got arrested for pitching an M-80 into the lagoon at a public park, and I can’t say I regret it.

But now the runup to every Fourth of July brings a week of TV-news moralizing about how awful fireworks are and police BS about how THIS TIME the department will be REALLY SERIOUS about enforcement. The spokespeople are hilarious: “Yes of course we will totally send our officers charging into drunken parties in private backyards, risking their lives to keep lawbreakers from injuring themselves. It’s our top priority. Youuuuuu betcha.”

But the highlight is the late news on the Fourth itself, when every station stops their tut-tutting and backdrops the news desk with a live feed of the Oakland skyline — a lacework of smoke trails silhouetted against a sky lit bright as day. AMERICA, dammit!

Still and all, I wouldn’t put explosives in the hands of Hootin’ Holler’s most belligerent drunk.

— Uncle Lumpy