The dog smells the chicken and wants to eat it, simple as
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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/2/24
I had never really thought about it, but if you had asked me before today, I would’ve told you I was pretty sure that the chickens Snuffy steals from his neighbors by stuffing them into a patchèd sack in the dead of night were still alive when he got home. Like, obviously they get killed eventually but, I dunno, I assumed it was right before the Smifs ate them. But surely if the lumps in that bag represented a live chicken, it would’ve been prompted to move around and squawk a bit by all the commotion in today’s strip, so I guess Snuffy just strangles the birds before they even leave the coop he’s stealing them from, the better to make a silent getaway. Not sure why that makes this whole scene so much grimmer, but I think you can agree that it really does.
Dennis the Menace, 12/2/24
I’m on the record as hating the running joke where Dennis slags on his mother’s cooking all the time. I thought I hated it because of its underlying gender politics, but it turns out I hate it even more because it set up today’s panel, in which Margaret is acting out an ambiguous wife/mother role as she and Dennis “play house” and Dennis experiences good cooking for the first time ever, and it’s so baffling to him he doesn’t even have a coherent vocabulary to describe it, which will change the nature of their relationship forever.
Hi and Lois, 12/2/24
Ha ha, we all know that regular guys (old) are constantly avoiding listening to their wives by watching the “big game” on TV. But what do younger guys (45 and under, a demographic into which Hi Flagston falls) do when their wife wants to “talk about her feelings or experiences that are meaningful to her” or whatever? What if I told you that they avoid all that by watching the “big game” on their [record scratch] PHONES????
98 replies to “The dog smells the chicken and wants to eat it, simple as”
Mary Worth Mashups: Which is the most likely next panel?
TIL Loweezy sleeps standing upright against a bare grey wall behind a threadbare curtain.
Dennis has been so traumatized by Alice’s bland, flavorless food that even Margaret’s lightly salted vague mush is a gourmet dish.
Slylock Fox-I’m sure Patty is stealing more than just toothpaste.
MW-This is when Mary breaks the news that Wilbur that she took over the advice column years ago.
DtM: Dennis and Margaret looking like a nice domestic couple? Take note here; this is comic history in the making. Be assured the insults will soon be flying. What we are seeing here my friends is the birth of the Lockhorns.
@Baja Gaijin:
The first one.
DtM: Teenage Margaret serves still juvenile Dennis a last meal before being replaced by a younger actress.
H&L: Lois tries to venting to Trixie, but is cut short when Sunbeam peeks out from behind a cloud.
MW: Wilbur’s going all the way to Tampa to show “Florida Man” just what “Charterstone Doofus” can do.
MW: Why does Wilbur need to pass off these genderbending advice column duties when he travels, again? Like, it maybe made a little sense when he went to Antarctica, maybe, but flying to a large American city isn’t exactly going off the grid. And frankly, how long does it even take to write one of these responses? Surely he could knock out a month’s worth of his womanly romantic insights on the flight from California to Florida alone.
SlyF: Toothpaste addiction is no laughing matter, especially when it’s so habit-forming and most victims are introduced to it at very young ages. It’s never easy staging an intervention for a friend you know is riding the enamel camel, but when you do it’s necessary to keep a cool head and make sure you don’t lose your marbles.
CS: So someone had to pull out of an severely-insignificant scheduled event but they already found a replacement for their completely unimportant role. Neat. Story over, right? No need to involve Harry Dinkle, right? …Right?
H&L: Must be an interesting game, the credenza stretched up to get a better look.
DtM: I think the worst part is the weird, tiny table she’s forcing Dennis to sit at.
Hi is just being considerate, because canonically Lois is the Broncos fan! Hi is a fan of (checks who wore #7 for the Steelers) (checks “Controversy” section of Ben Roethlisberger’s Wikipedia entry) (spends rest of day depressed).
JP – Don’t be mad, you know how it is. You start feeding them on your back porch and then eventually they want to come in. Just don’t tell your stepmom yet, she’ll have kittens when she finds out!
SlyF – Good god, look what you’re serving! Who wouldn’t be seeking out some toothpaste?!?!
JP: Welp, here comes another hypocritical and despicable act by our heroic publically-trusted judges that will never have any meaningful consequences for them. To be fair, both Alan and Randy have enabled prolific murderers before, so at least these continuing heinous deeds are in character. And sure, Ann definitely participated in and likely caused Don’s untimely death on top of scamming countless people and committing who knows how many other crimes over the past two decades, but she’s a Parker, damn it, and that means she deserves better than the mockery of justice that Alan and Randy arbitrarily dish out to the defendants in their court rooms.
Anyway, after we get through an obnoxious amount of DRAMA! on Randy’s part over this reveal, we’ll probably be getting down to the business of solving Don’s death. To refresh your memory, Marciuliano made Don’s death unusually convoluted as we last saw him yelling at Ann in the woods about how he wants her to live free, then was discovered dead by Randy with absolutely no external indicators of any injury or fight, and then even the official autopsy report failed to turn up any kind of explanation for Don’s death. A good mystery or thriller writer might have a satisfying answer for this. Francesco Marciuliano absolutely does not. This is going to be retconned, at least in part and possibly in whole.
On the bright side, at least we’re back to the fun silly criminal conspiracy stuff, so we should be rid of Neddy and Sophie for a good while (apart from Christmas cameos).
What if you took Pascal’s Wager because you read that the Lord would come as a thief in the night, but then only an actual thief, Snuffy Smith, came in the night and he did not bring salvation but a chicken? Would you feel stupid or betrayed? Would you have done more coveting and more bearing false witness?
Hi’s sudden flip from depressive to manic makes me think that he put a lot of money into an ill-advised over/under bet on the number of fields goals the Broncos would kick.
H&L: OMG, even when you think you have their attention, husbands are watching the game on their PHONES!
Dennis is a Gen Alpha kid who has absorbed the boomer humour and ideas of Mr Wilson. He knows he is supposed to complain about his bitchy wife, but he has not a clear idea why
Margaret should pull a Harding and just poison Dennis
@matt w: aw hell, it’s too early for me to see properly–the Broncos wear orange and Lois is in a 49ers or Chiefs uniform in that old strip. Oh well.
Anyway, while looking for that old strip I found out that Chip’s girlfriend does have a name–it’s Julie! But Julie is an ex-girlfriend now, awarded a name only as she departed the canon, never to be seen again. Wonder how many years it’s going for the writers to think up a name for the new girlfriend (my money’s on “Lisa”).
JP: Good job, Alan. As an officer of the court, Randy is obligated to report his sister to the police. Not doing so will make him a felon. Have you lost your mind? (which may explained why he’s feeding her raw potatoes)
Snuffy does not have foxlike tread, but he does steal chickens which is very foxlike.
Then I started imagining, what if John Rose got bored (like when introduced Lil Sparky) and made all of the cast anthropomorphic animals, what Snuffy would look like as a fox in John Rose’s art style. Only to feel repulsed at the image in my mind.
BGSS: Oops, looks like Snuffy tripped over his dog and fell right onto his Roland TR-909 drum machine. Who knew that Hilly Billy House was so big in Hootin Hollar?
DtM: See, this would have been a lot better if it were The Lockhorns.
H&L: Jesus, Hi: how high do you have to put the brightness on your phone to light up the room like that? You’re going to burn your retinas clear off….
@Ettorre: Yes to all your questions, and an actual chuckle out loud.
Hi and Lois: It’s funny because Hi’s gambling addiction has driven him to seek out the NFL’s newest venture, Monday Morning Football!
Dennis the Menace: Knowing at ages five and seven, and acknowledging with sly grins and meaningful glances, that as adults you will maintain an SM relationship based on domineering patriarchy and subservient complementarian gender norms? Very menacing.
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: Barney Google and Snuffy Smith: Same joke, except for chickens.
@Hibbleton: Well, as jroggs pointed out, both men (and basically their entire extended family, probably including the raspberry-haired brat) are so dirty at this point one more felony on top of all the others really isn’t going to make any difference.
Gee, you think Marculiano is trying to make a statement about the state of politics and justice in 21st Century America? At least he hasn’t sunk to bringing in an ‘Ian Mollusk’. Yet…
P.S. We all know Ann is yet another vain, conniving female in the CIApril mold, right? There’s no reason for her to greet her blood relative with a formal identification of ‘Brother’ if she wasn’t.
MW: Why go to Tampa, Wilbur? Just stay here and interview Mary. She was so sick, she shouldn’t be alive but she is!!
MW: Mary was feeling down, but now that she
gets to meddle in countless strangers’ livesfill in on Wilbur’s advice column, everything is so much better, oh so much better, feeling really, really great….In case that was too vague, Mary is TOTALLY going to open-mouth kiss Dr. Jeff
CS: Just tell the kids Harry Dinkle’s going to be their substitute band director. A third of the band will quit on the spot, another third will inject themselves with COVID, and the parents of the remaining third will threaten to sue the school if they give Dinkle any authority over their children. Problem solved.
Side note: why does Lillian know this and not Dinkle? Dinkle’s been seen working as a choir director, substituting for one-armed Becky, and arranging musical events on a freelance basis. He’d be way more plugged in to the local music scene.
FG: Well, this is nice. I was concerned that King Leo here would make a pact with the Octopus Men (very dangerous, and inky) and the Grilled Black Sea Bass Men (very delicious) to invade Shark City. Just in case, though, he should probably attach a leash to that ridiculous nose ring.
BTW, aren’t cats famous for liking to EAT fish? No wonder the Shark Men are hedging their bets.
MW – I wonder if Mary or Wilbur produces a higher suicide rate when doing Ask Wendy.
REX MORGAN M.D.: You know, Rex really didn’t have to nag poor Mr Lawton about his lack of exercise last week. Apparently he’s in top physical condition if he can be stabbed but react to it as if he got a bit of indigestion for eating too much ice cream or something.
MW: Wilbur finds himself the center of controversy when his “Ask Wendy” column runs afoul of Fla’s anti-trans laws.
BG&SS – My dog has no nose. Then how does he smell? Just terrible….
DtM – It tastes like shit…but it’s really good shit…and I like shit….
H&L – Hold that thought – I think he’s about to nut….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
MW: Oh, this makes me furious. I’m from Tampa, I lived in the state for the awful 2004 hurricane season, and I assure you we have very little patience for misery tourists. If you want to help after a hurricane, pick up a chainsaw, hand out supplies, care for displaced people, or clean up debris. Another tip: show up less than seven weeks after the storm ends!
(NOTE: TV journalists are the worst kind of misery tourists. Except The Weather Channel. Floridians genuinely LOVE them.)
MW: What sort of scoops will Wilbur get in Tampa from survivors of the recent hurricanes? I don’t know how many “brushes with death” stories are out there. There’s lots of people patiently waiting for building inspectors to issue reports that determine if and when they can rebuild. There are people patiently waiting for insurance claims to be processed. I’m sure there are people staying with family and friends or in tenuous temporary housing situations that are straining their finances and mental health.
BG&SS – Of course Snuffy would be a dog person, because a dog’s affection, like Snuffy’s chicken meals, are unearned.
Dennis the Menace – Or does Josh really hate Dennis because Dennis can’t help but consume stuff that he knows he will hate, but gets a particular joy being critical of it? As a frequent commenter, I know I feel seen in this strip.
Hi and Lois – I don’t mean to downplay the emotional importance of Lois’ story, but Hi’s interest in the football game does have more material importance to the family and its future, at least if I am correctly reading his baggy-eyed expression as a sign he bet the next six months of mortgage payments on a prop bet for Bronco’s kick Wil Lutz making this field goal.
Somewhere an unborn man cave is looking upon today’s Hi and Lois and weeping at the sight of a man who hasn’t shut his wife out completely. How much longer can he bear to hear the voice of the woman he claims to love?
Hold that thought. The $ s h o t is near.
JP: Since the Judge does not let her upstairs, Ann needs to sleep in the darkroom sink. Unfortunately, Ann also needs to defecate in the darkroom sink.
Phantom: ”Bing Crosby, my favorite vocalist! I thought you died in 1977! Hey, sing us a little ‘White Christmas,’ huh?”
MW – I wonder how many people write to Ask Wendy because their boyfriend has Peter Pan Syndrome and she would be the one to ask.
Tampa people, man. People who have somehow unwittingly ticked off a jealous god so badly that he inflicts hurricanes on them, and then, just to kick them when they’re down, makes them face a microphone wielding Weelbur Weston.
Weelbur’s column still exists? Who was running it during the weeks he was in meltdown over Willan or whatever?
MW: “I thought about going to western North Carolina instead, but then I said, the seafood would be better in Florida. Get some sun, meet some ladies on the beach, get some me time.”
MW: Wonder how the Tampopos will react when Wilbur requests extra mayonnaise on his Cubano.
BRONCOS?!?
DtM — Looks like Margaret ate the side of the mushroom which makes you grow larger. But will she ever outgrow the patriarchy?
H&L — Really, Hi? A field goal? Not even a touchdown? You’re pissing you wife off for a field goal when all you had to do was sit there?
Rookie mistake.
BG&SS For all you flatlanders who think that chicken stealin’ is an easy gig, Snuffy is here to tell you different!
H&L: Why does Hi look so wistful at the prospect of the Broncos getting a field goal? Sure, the glory days of John Elway and Peyton Manning are a distant memory, but at 7-5 they’re’ not going through a scoring drought. It’s not like they’re the Raiders or anything.
@Baja Gaijin:
Unfortunately, the meddlegasm.
I need Mary to slap Weelbur. I need anyone to slap Weelbur. Had it not been for copyright issues I would have Weelbur turn up in my comic strip and Ukranazi Stepan slap Weelbur.
Phantom: “…but for me, it was a Tuesday.”
C’shaft: The only way that exposition could be more stilted would be if you added “As you know…” to the beginning.
GT: What do they need Gil for? Sounds like his coaching style consists of mangled Deion Sanders quotes.
JP: “Uh, yes, it’s Anne. Didn’t you pick that up from the way I got all anxious and apologetic when we were coming down here? I swear, Randy, your brain cells must be so few and far apart they have to use smoke signals to get each others’ attention.”
Luann: Phil deals with a lot of gross stuff, but he draws the line at skin-to-skin contact with Luann.
MW: Now really, haven’t the people of Tampa suffered enough?
Phantom: Come on, Diana, you can’t expect your husband to remember every random thug he permanently brands…
Pluggers have sad, empty lives.
SH: Isn’t “humans” kind of an arbitrary designation in this strip by now? Everyone in it is either a former animal, an animal who occasionally masquerades as a human, a former human who’s now a kind of plant creature, or a human who occasionally becomes a mermaid. Hell, the most normal character is a young time-traveling Leonard da Vinci.
Don Abundio, translated:
“This is a lovely Village you’ve built here”
“It has everything you’ll ever need!”
“Can I go for a drive?”
“No, no private cars allowed”
“The trolley will take you anywhere you like, as long as you arrive back here in the end!”
Ha… it’s funny because we think Hi is showing visible distress at the bad day his wife was having, when he is distressed about his football team winning. It will be funnier later when Hi thinks his wife is bringing him a knife to cut his steak, when she is bringing him a knife to stab him multiple times.
La Belleza Interior, translated:
“What’s harvesting your hay, Lu?”
“Ah, nice buffet etiquette. Anyway, asshole, I’ve lost my boyfriend, my job, my faith, my car keys, and somehow my sense of object permanence. You?”
“I’m eating a bowl of cornbread!”
Lois is a Millennial, so she loves reworking specific Simpsons quotes in her conversation — “So then I says to Mabel I says”. Hi is tired of the self-referential humour of the 2010s and would rather move on
@Baja Gaijin:
Three beauts, Baja, but #1 with Mary having her hearts on does it for me!
Hi absolutely would be watching football on the TV that the Flagstons are known to have, but the joke wouldn’t work without the sudden appearance of the cell phone, so maybe they should’ve used Chip and his red-haired non-Julie girlfriend, except Chip seems to be genuinely into her and I’m not sure if he’s into football, and I think I just put a lot more thought into Hi and Lois canon than the writers usually do.
@Hibbleton: @The Quiet Man: Hey, what’s a little misprision among family?
Phantom: I bet it would be big fun to run a British pub, as long as I could afford a bouncer to pitch the lager louts out to the pavement on Football days, but I probably wouldn’t choose to hang a sign depicting me getting punched in the face.
H&L: Hi’s probably watching the Thursday night game on Amazon Prime and can’t connect on his TV.
@49 Ukranazi Stepan: Did you get some vicarious enjoyment from the second mashup? He’s got the muffin he was eating atop his head!
G. &#$&*(#! Thorp – The artwork is trending back toward normal, whatever normal is in this case.
Meanwhile, from the GoComics comments:
henryjbarajas about 10 hours ago
I had a manager when I was a bill collector back in 2006. He is a US Marine Vietnam Vet. He once told me “if you look good, you feel good…” and it always stuck with me. This strip is dedicated to him.
Good to know the Hammer monitors the comments section. And he’s been on here, too. Hope it still is. (Greetings, Henry. Please give us more bad puns on MILFord.)
MW- Wilbur is off to Florida. You have been warned. Stock up on eye bleach as he unveils the speedo again!
@1 Baja Gaijin:
Most likely number three *snerk*.
Mary Worth: Tampa’s mayor invited Wilbur to visit. On purpose! He wants buck up his populace’s spirit by showing that anything is better than having a Wilbur Weston lurking amongst their lives. If they’re still depressed from all the destruction and slow recovry to normal, he’s calling in the big guns, Mary Worth, to meddle them back to glowing mental health.
@63 Sequitur: I’m glad someone read that far down. I’m guessing Toby’s on her third pitcher of Potato-Ade.
Hi and Lois: I imagine Hi actually is watching the game on his big-screen TV — but he’s texting about it back-and-forth with Thirsty, complete with excited emojis every time their team scores.
Dennis the Menace: Margaret, who is also a young child, is serving Dennis snails from her backyard garden. And from the creepily satisfied look on her face, she knows what’s on the plate and Dennis doesn’t — but after watching a few cooking shows on TV, she already realizes a key secret of French chefs is that everything tastes pretty good when you load it up with an unhealthy amount of butter.
Mary Worth: “Mary, I’ve come to visit you for the first time since you were too sick to leave your condo. Now, feed me and do me a favor!” “Ha-ha, that’s our Wilbur!”
MW: If Mary doles out relationship advice this month based on her own experience, there’s sure to be a dip in the birth rate next September.
SFx: Give Patty a break, Slylock! Opossums have 50 teeth, more than any other land mammal in North America.
FC: A flat screen TV not on the floor?! For this strip that’s just weird.
BGSS: City boy Josh has much to learn. There’s no need to steal a chicken when you stumble across fresh roadkill…
DtM: …as Margaret clearly knows.
BGSS: kudos for getting the Moon phase correct!
What if I told you that they avoid all that by watching the “big game” on their [fax machine handshake] PHONES????
Nice to see the Six Chips store is well stocked with III MIX, you never can have enough of that on hand.
MW: is there no one at Charterstone who doesn’t like muffins? I never eat them.
@jroggs: I guess we are all supposed to have forgotten that the last time Alan aided and abetted a wanted criminal Alan got sent to prison. Heaven knows the writer has.
@Professor Well Actually: Muffins are dry as f*** give me a cupcake over them any day.
@Ukulele Ike: I like how in some fiction, if a writer wants to put in furry races, they try to embellish it by giving their races names such as:
Rhinos- Wallops
Cats- Khajiit
Hyenas: Gnolls
Foxes- Kobolds
But Flash Gordon is to the point. “I have a race of shark people, I’ll call them…. Shark Men.”
BGSS I know the dog is drawn to suggest he’s all scruffy and ill-kempt, but he also looks like he just ran through a cactus patch, with all the needles sticking out of his fur. Ouch, Snuffy!
Fifty years ago powerful Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills sought to explain a few things about his night out with the Tidal Basin Bombshell while Major Hoople enjoyed a quiet night drinking with his male friends.
SS: Snuffy doesn’t strangle the chickens he steals! He wrings their necks, the quick and relatively humane hillbilly way of dispatching a chicken when you haven’t got a hatchet and a chopping block handy. Done right, it’s like being hanged by a competent hangman. One quick snap of the spinal cord, and it’s all over.
@Professor Well Actually: Muffins are available in NYC at every bagel shop, but I think of them as primarily a New England thing. I will eat blueberry muffins when I am in Maine, but then I eat blueberry anything when I am in Maine.
@The Rambling Otter: Weird. I always thought a “Kobold” was a supernatural creature living underground, particularly in mines, but Wikipedia says it’s the German version of a household spirit — like the British Boggart, the French Lutin, and the Scandinavian Tomten.
Zits: So Jeremy eats some Doritos brand chips and then he decides to wipe his hands all over his naked torso which dissolve his flesh or something? WTF is this nonsense?
Baby Blues: I don’t think elementary school holiday programs are choreographed because that kind of thing is way too complicated for kids that age and I’m 100% certain they wouldn’t put one of the kids in charge of it. WTF is this nonsense?
Pluggers: If Pluggers had a feeding tube they could just be chemically sedated the rest of their lives, nobody would ever have to talk to them again. Think of how awesome that would be.
Garfield: Garfield reminds us he doesn’t have any genitalia to scratch but he still has the urge to do so.
Slylock Fox: Is that just a very small cow or are the rodents in this universe very very large? Considering how many of these mysteries involve knowledge of animal facts I’d at least expect them to know about how big a rabbit is.
Beetle Bailey: HAHA, they’re being made to dig their own graves!
I’m on the record of hating Josh’s blog. I thought it was due to lame jokes and catchphrases that he uses over and over again, but now he’s taking me to a new level of hatred by using the phrase “underlying gender politics”.
Your party lost, son. Deal with it.
@Hibbleton: Hmm, I thought they were Mary Worth’s attempt at Baguettes.
Margaret is acting out an ambiguous wife/mother role as she and Dennis “play house” but Dennis will soon take it to a very menacing level when he intentionally soils himself and forces Margaret to change him.
AC: I’m perplexed by the perspex. I believe some Jobcentres do have clear plastic shields between advisor and customer for safety. Others, like the one I used to go to, take the view that starting out from the assumption the customers might turn violent is a self-fulfilling prophecy and would rather seem welcoming. I’m not aware of any that have clear plastic shields with huge cutouts that would make it very easy for an angry customer to grab the advisor’s collar and drag him through it, and I don’t know what purpose that would serve. It doesn’t even function as a Covid screen!
Crank: If we needed more reasons to hate Harry Dinkle (and even if we don’t, Batty’s going to keep giving them to us) consider the bland “That’s unfortunate” with which he greets Lillian’s news. He knows what she’s asking, but she needs to actually ask. He won’t volunteer to do the job he actually resents anyone else ever doing, because he’s the World’s Greatest Band Director and people need to respect that.
GT: Possibly the most unearned “He’s back!” moment in the entire history of media.
JP: Wait, seriously? I know I predicted this on Friday, but I was kidding!! Judge Parker is now firmly the “too dumb to parody” zone.
And I guess when Randy found his dad in an angsty fugue about his lost daughter being who knows where, that was just method acting? Or maybe the Judge Emeritus doesn’t need to be angsty to sit in his darkened study alone and knock back scotch. The alternative, after all, is spending time with Katherine.
MW: Hoboy, these are always fun. Ask Wendy, for those who haven’t seen it before, is an existential advice column, where people are less likely to ask “I just walked in on my best friend and my partner in bed together, what should I tell my best friend’s partner the next time we hook up?” and more likely to ask “I don’t really understand what the meaning of life is, could you explain it, preferably in trite platitudes?” It’s basically just an excuse for Moy to have Mary meandering about her philosophy without interruption for a. Whole. Sodding. Week.
S4th: Yeah, the advantage of Ces’s intentional comedy strip and its flexible fourth wall is that he can admit the timeline makes no sense and the holidays all blend together. Whereas the Parkers will emerge from the basement to find the decorations already up, and just pretend it wasn’t Thanksgiving when they went down there.
@Banana Jr. 6000: I dunno, I would honestly be prepared to believe that the local music scene crosses the street to avoid him.
Lalo Y Lola Spanish to English.
Hi and Lois started in 1954, meaning that Hi was originally born in approx. 1909, and currently has much more in common with a 115-year-old than somebody born in 1979.
@The Quiet Man: At least he hasn’t sunk to bringing in an ‘Ian Mollusk’. Yet…
God help us if Manley ever tells Marciuliano that he wants to draw robots. I’ll take Ian Mollusk over Sophie and Glen go to the Mecha theme park and it turns into WestWorld because CIApril!
@UncleJeffers: Re Zits: The bigger question is, is Jeremy a man or a mouse?
LUANN: Of course the 19-year-old girl who still believes in Santa Claus thinks that this guy doesn’t wash his hands regularly.
Close To Home: Melody Mare gets a cameo.
That’s a pun I saw in Mad Magazine back in the 1960’s.
@Ukulele Ike: That’s the weird thing about fiction.
You can name your animal races whatever the heck you want.
I was specifically referring to a franchise called “The Tenth Line”
Where one of the protagonists is an anthropomorphic fox, but he’s otherwise referred to as a Kobold.
Because… um… -shrugs-
@Ukulele Ike: I made a huge blueberry crumble just the other day, it was awesome!
@richardf8: God help us if Manley ever tells Marciuliano that he wants to draw robots. I’ll take Ian Mollusk over Sophie and Glen go to the Mecha theme park and it turns into WestWorld because CIApril!
Manley draws the Phantom as well so he can get his robot/Mollusk fix there. Personally, I’d be happy if Manley just once said he wanted to draw some scenes from the legal-themed soap opera in and outside an actual courthouse.
@Baja Gaijin: Gotta go with Numero Uno, which is very amusing. Per #2, Wilbur being smacked that hard only happens in my dreams, and per #3, I looked up nicknames for residents of Tampa yesterday. Alas, “Tampons” was not listed.
@Ukulele Ike: MW: Wonder how the Tampopos will react when Wilbur requests extra mayonnaise on his Cubano.
_________________________________________________________________________
I thought people from Tampa were called Tampons.
@John Plugger Mellencamp: I seem to recall Manley saying on Facebook that one reason Judge Parker doesn’t do courtroom stories is that they are too much work to draw. JP probably pays way less to both writer and artist than Phantom, and that’s going to dictate the size of the stories.
@White Rabbit: What you said.