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Panel from Slylock Fox, 7/12/20

Slylock isn’t panicking because he knows that, due to the square-cube law, you can’t simply make an animal bigger but keep its proportions and functions otherwise the same: its mass increases more quickly than its surface area, and the physics that allow its anatomy to work would simply fail in a much larger version of the creature. This poor monstrosity is no doubt dying in agony right now, its internal organs collapsing under their own weight! (If you’re wondering how Slylock being a human-sized fox fits in with all this, the answer is he’s actually normal fox sized and anything you see to the contrary is just Lord of the Rings-style forced perspective trickery.)

Dustin, 7/12/20

Dustin: come for the pointless intergenerational warfare, stay for an extremely unpleasant new euphemism for genitals!

Hagar the Horrible, 7/12/20

Another victory of the working class over the bosses who would divide them! War is a racket, kids!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/12/20

The greatest love story every written keeps getting more romantic, everybody

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Slylock Fox, 2/21/23

So I guess these nightmare-bugs are supposed to be … termites? Or some other horrible bug that feasts on wood, but I’m not going to bother researching what that might be because I’d probably end up seeing actual photographs of these nightmares, which is definitely not something I’m up for. My point, though, is that clearly whatever sinister process granted sapience to the animals of the Slylockverse did so to even the very tiny and very gross among them. The question that today’s strip raises is whether these bugs, as part of their transformation, achieved human-scale proportions in defiance of the square-cube law, or if they remained tiny but their chefs carve bits of wood into miniature replicas of full-sized logs, as part of a elaborate culinary culture that we’re just getting a glimpse of here.

Pluggers, 2/21/23

Pluggers is, of course, a fundamentally sad text, a ongoing and often quite grim paean to a supposedly bygone set of mores. Today, however, may be the first panel I can remember in which the practice being held up as an object of nostalgic longing is just obviously, demonstrably worse than what we have now. “Oh, can you kids today block that creepy guy you work with on Instagram so he doesn’t post borderline sexual comments on every one of your selfies, and also complain to HR about him? In my day, if I didn’t want to know he was jerking off, I would have to just leave my phone off the hook so that he couldn’t call me and nobody could either, and also quit my job!”

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 6/18/23

This image is, quite frankly, one of the most horrifying that Slylock Fox has presented me with in all my years of reading and commenting on this strip. I suppose Weirdly imagined that his genetically modified mega-bee would itself be able to use its powerful stinger to attack his enemies and fetch its own honey, but thanks to the square cube law its insectoid anatomy means it can barely move, so it spends its days in a cage in Weirdly’s basement, dragging itself over to bowls of honey that someone else has to steal for it. We don’t have any indication that this bee is sapient like the other animals, and truly it would be a blessing if it weren’t, as an intelligent mega-bee would have nothing to do all day but contemplate the innate wrongness of its own existence.

Shoe, 6/18/23

Speaking of fucked up animal business, imagine if you were a mortician and you came into your showroom one day only to find some old guy in there sticking his head into the coffins, taking big sniffs and making satisfied sounds. I know morticians see a lot of stuff that would haunt us normies but this one would have to unsettle even them. Not sure how both the mortician and the old guy being birds would affect things but I can’t imagine it would help.

Gasoline Alley, 6/18/23

Can you imagine how annoying someone’s on-stage patter must be if you get up and demand that they start playing music while they’re in the middle of an anecdote about how people don’t like their music? Rufus must be even more irritating in person than he comes across on the page.

Panel from The Lockhorns, 6/18/23

I’ve never watched Bridgerton, but through cultural osmosis have learned that much of the first season’s plot revolves around a sexually naive young woman whose husband keeps using the withdrawal method and who slowly comes to understand that this is why she isn’t getting pregnant, which means that, to be blunter, much of the first season’s plot revolves around semen, so it’s fun to rate how unsettling it is to imagine various comics characters having in-depth conversations about it. Jeremy Duncan and his mom? Not great. Crankshaft? Very bad. Leroy and Loretta Lockhorn? Hoo boy.