Birds and bird-adjacent business
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Mother Goose and Grimm, 9/9/26
“Why do they mention the King’s Horses in ‘Humpty Dumpty?’” is an extremely hoary bit at this point, but I have to say I like the art here. Humpty’s shell has shattered, creating a jagged mouth for what we must assume is the first time. The very event that has caused him such agony also provided him with the means to scream! It’s a neat little trick.
Mary Worth, 9/9/26
Alma … no! You need to follow your first instincts and remain aloof from gossip and speculation here. Look at Nelly’s crazed expression in panel two! She says your guess is as good as hers … but she’s clearly been guessing in vivid, erotic detail for hours now. Let her be a cautionary example for you!
Shoe, 9/9/26
The saving grace of Shoe is that no matter how much you hate reading these jokes, the characters’ facial expressions make it clear that they hate saying them much, much more.
38 replies to “Birds and bird-adjacent business”
MW: Alma is no longer the best Mary Worth character.
Pluggers: Ha ha! Pluggers are too stupid to tell the difference between an SUV and a house. Ha ha! Pluggers’ eyes are too diseased to tell the difference between an SUV and a house. Ha ha! Pluggers are too cheap to buy eyelasses that’ll let them see the difference between an SUV and a house.
MGG – If you cracked Humpty’s mouth all the way around, it would look like he’s wearing a Charlie Brown shirt. Good grief.
@Baja Gaijin: My gosh, I didn’t know Joni Mitchell lives in the same city as me. Next thing she’ll be doing is putting up a parking lot – and using her house key to unlock her car.
When it turns out it was just an innocent situation, Nelly will have eggs on her face! Unless it was actually a compromising situation and Mary had Ian’s eggs on her face!
MW – Tomorrow Nelly Finelli will tell Alma about the obscene phone call she got: “For 20 minutes, he described the most disgusting, vile things . . . “
@Ettorre: Ettorre, I have some news for you about which sex has which gametes….
“We live in a cancel culture”. Horsefeathers! You live in a legacy strip, the very definition of something that should be cancelled but isn’t!
RMMD: Hey, where’s the ‘Jimmy a.k.a. Rene Belluso’? The Narration Box is falling down on the job!
MW: Love Alma’s exhausted face in panel one. I’m taking that ‘yeah, that sounds *suspicious*’ as being delivered with a heavy dose of sarcasm.
JP: [voiceover] That was the last time either of them were seen… alive…
Luann: Ah, as part of the upcoming MASSIVE STATUS QUO CHANGE, we can see that Little Miss Crook and Liar will become roomies with Scrubs so Inner Beauty can be left alone to follow her ‘path’. They will soon join Delta, Krystal, Knute, etc…
Ph: Schmelon Shmusk didn’t get fabulously rich by going with the highest bidder. Ol’ Gil must have been really convincing selling those drones made from the same material as clay pigeons…
FG: Uh-oh. It’s Chekhov’s multi-purpose ray gun. You know that puppy’s going to get used before the last act.
Why do Shoe characters even care about airports? I mean, they’re BIRDS — they don’t need no stinkin’ airplanes to fly! Or, doh, maybe in the Shoe-iverse their avian flight is regulated by air traffic controllers? Nah, too elaborate a bit. Here’s hoping they all get sucked into a jet engine, causing a spectacular crash.
MGG No, no, no: neither the horses nor the men could put Humpty Dumpty together again, and if it were because of union rules, that would actually be a joke!
MW Buried in all this intrigue is a pretty suck burn in Mary. Ian has a young beautiful wife, what would he be doing with Mary who is neither of those things?
Good on MG&G for observing the canonical answer to the “belt or neckwear?” question established by Humpty’s insistence that he was wearing a cravat in Through the Looking Glass.
@Ettorre: :chef’s kiss: I love it.
MW: What’s he doing with Mary? No, seriously. What’s anyone doing with Mary? In fact, in that light, avoiding witnesses sounds perfectly reasonable.
Mary Worth:
“Ian Cameron got out of Mary Worth’s car and looked around as if he was trying to avoid witnesses!”
“Listen, Nelly — you would too if you were riding along in a GMC Generica of the sort that Mary possesses!”
Luann : Gee, I wonder why Tara initially told Luann to give up on trying to become an assistant manager at Weenie World because it was too hard a goal for her, then went behind her back to tell Phil her getting that promotion was a sure thing. It’s almost like she tried to get Phil’s hopes up, while making sure he’d get disappointed, to try and drive a wedge between Luann and Phil!
Also, what happened to Mario, Phil’s friend that was going to become his roommate in Luann’s place?
Also, nice to see Luann has completely recovered from being
completely exhausted from the same kind of schedule the rest of the cast handle with no issuebeing sleepy because she just pulled an all-nighter due to her working the graveyard shift.***************
Mother Goose & Grimm : Hey, if those are the King’s Horses, shouldn’t they be wearing uniforms or something? At least saddles?
… I just always assumed that it was “All the King’s Horses, and all the King’s Men” implied a cavalry unit.
**************
Shoe : I feel there was a joke about streaming services, and the increasing disposability of tv series there, if the strip had actually wanted to be more “current”.
Mary Worth:
“What’s he doing with Mary?”
“Let’s broaden that, Alma — what’s anyone doing with Mary?”
MG&G – Granted, it’s early and my eyes are still booting up, but it looked to me like the horses were about to deliver a restaurant health score of F to this pop-up egg stand.
Luann: It’s been mentioned a lot, but it will never stop being weird to me how they have a supposedly-romantic 21st-century USA couple planning on “moving in” as “we each need our own bedroom”. The subcultures where it wouldn’t be assumed that they’re already sleeping (and more:) together *also* don’t approve of the appearance of premarital ‘relations’ so not only would they disapprove of Luann+Phil, they also wouldn’t approve of a _supposedly_ platonic roommate situation as with Pru. The Evansii have managed to create a world that’s out of touch with _everyone_
*as with Tara, right? I barely remember anyone beyond the main cast in this strip
GT: Since when has being either cis or white put a target on anyone’s back?
Shoe: If we really lived in a cancel culture, a belligerent drunken nudist probably wouldn’t be allowed to continue running a newspaper.
Alma: Shots fired. “But his wife is hot! What could be possibly want with that hag?” is such a funny take on this. “Mary’s far more age-appropriate, but laughing? In a car? You should only car-laugh with your wife, who is [[checks notes]] pretty! I mean, that’s the only thing I know about her, honestly, we’ve never spoken, I think her name might be Tommy, but– she’s beautiful! And young! Mary’s not even funny! Have you heard her tight five at the Charterstone monthly residents’ breakfast? So many jokes about muffins. Anyway, Nelly, gotta dash, I’ve got like five past-due bills here and I’ve gotta make myself scarce before The Man comes a’callin’. Toodles!”
CS: When the AIs start using terms and let’s face it, slurs like “sack of flesh”, “puny flesh creatures”, “squishies”, “protein bags”, etc. keep that EMP weaponry handy.
MW: “You’ve given me a lot to think about, Nellie, but since it involves Ian Cameron having maybe having sexual relations with Mary Worth-” :vomits..a lot:
FG: Flash: “A ray gun?” Zarkov (seething): “Now listen here you little…”
Shoe — And somehow this horrible joke (?) is the trigger that created a window into the long, dark night of the soul.
MG&G — Um, the nursery rhyme specifically states that the horses could *not* put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Unless the item in their job description requires them to stand around and do nothing with their prehensile hooves. . .
MG&G: Did the king’s horses arrive while Humpty was still in the act of falling, or are those bits of his shell stuck into the wall as opposed to drifting toward the ground?
MG&G: I love how the artist is painfully aware that horses don’t have opposable thumbs–or indeed, any digits to speak of–but still wanted the horse in the drawing to be holding its job description, and so compromised by wedging the paper awkwardly under the fetlock hairs.
MW: Clearly Mary is giving Ian something that he can’t get at home: copious amounts of baked goods.
Mother Goose and Grimm:
I recall reading something somewhere claiming that the line about “all the king’s horses” in the Humpty Dumpty rhyme is a reference to the use of horses to make glue. I kind of doubt it’s the intended interpretation, but it does make this strip much darker, in that these sentient talking horses are discovering that they are legally required to die so that their remains can be boiled down into an adhesive that will be used in a futile attempt to make this egg-man monstrosity whole again.
C’shaft: Look, the type of person who still calls in their pizza orders rather than submitting them online is the type of person who definitely doesn’t want to be talking to a robot.
DT: “He’s a fatty-fat-fat and doesn’t like to exercise.”
Dustin: Look, Dustdad, you started this whole “when I was your age” nonsense, you gotta accept the consequences.
FG: “Now pay attention, Double-Oh–er, I mean Flash…”
Pluggers really shouldn’t be living without supervision.
Shoe:
“We live in a cancel culture,” says the bird-man. He has no immediate follow-up. Where is he going with this? Has he committed an unforgivable, life-ruining transgression? The silence lengthens. Shoe’s cigar goes out, and he’s finished his drink, leaving the ice cubes sitting in an empty glass. “Especially flights at the airport.” Everyone there is a bit disappointed, but also somehow relieved.
SHOE: I don’t see the problem here; airports have bars.
MW: The girls are giving Ian WAY more player cred than he deserves. I’d have gone with; “Ian got out of the car and looked around like he didn’t know where he was.”
@Anonymous: “I just always assumed that it was “All the King’s Horses, and all the King’s Men” implied a cavalry unit.”
There is a theory, that “Humpty Dumpty” was actually a cannon perched on the wall of a fort before crashing down to the ground.
I was going to ask why Shoe is hanging around at a bar at or near the airport in the middle of the night… but no, that tracks.
Mary Worth: All week long, I’ve been wondering what the story is with Alma and her uncanny valley skin tone. I’ve finally got it figured out: she’s covered herself in ashes as repentance for the sin of appearing in this dreck. Reader, do the same! Get your sackcloth on before the angel of comics judgment appears!
MW: Sounds like somebody has a crush on Toby!
RxMD: The hallway dimmed and then faded from existence, leaving behind a green-smear impression of where a door had been. Employing the higher levels of his (recently patented) technique, available only to (dues paying) Third Stage Initiates, Lyle Ollman traversed the negative spaces between comic strip panels. A “miracle method” indeed. Next Stop: Glenwood Prison.
Shoe: Wait, nursery rhymes are supposed to make sense?
@Twinkles the Elf: You’re a mean elf. I like it.