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Tina’s Groove, 5/8/24

So Tina’s Groove is one of the “new” comics I’ve been reading lately, though in the interest of total accuracy I should note that these strips aren’t new at all, seeing as Tina’s Groove stopped publishing in 2017 and a cursory glance at the copyright date would reveal that this strip in particular is 15 years old. But who cares! I still hate on Crock despite it being in perpetual reruns, because the people want my opinions [note to self: double-check on this] and anyway, the origin of this site was me making fun of whatever happened to be in the paper’s comics section that day, and now we’re just letting “King Features’ Comics Kingdom website” stand in for “the paper” in a transition that definitely explains why the economics of journalism are in total freefall.

Anyway, a fun thing about these older strips is seeing that even in fairly recent history some terms we take for granted had not quite gelled. Was there really a time, when this blog was already a going concern making jokes about how Dr. Jeff’s daughter accidentally fell for a bigamist, when people were calling fist bumps “knuckle bumping”? Or was Tina’s Groove just extremely unhip? I’ll just say that it could’ve gone worse.

Gasoline Alley,5/8/24

Speaking of linguistic evolution and being extremely unhip, has there ever been a worse rebranding in history than Twitter becoming “X”? This is a name that literally nobody uses in real life, and I speak as someone hopelessly addicted to the site (they briefly banned me for no reason I could ever establish, then decided that the harshest punishment they could give me was to let me back on). Basically the only people who ever use the “real” name are publications that feel like they have to and people trying to ingratiate themselves with Elon Musk. I honestly feel like getting Gasoline Alley to use it is a real coup, and I think they could’ve dispensed with the “formerly known as Twitter” bit because it’s not like the strip readership has ever heard of it. They already started panicking when they read the word “internet”!

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Shoe, 5/7/24

A classic Shoe bit is to use the structure of a test question at Skyler’s school to deliver a bad joke, even though the result is a test question no teacher, no matter how outlandish their pedagogy, would ever write. Anyway, I appreciate that today’s strip is mixing it up by changing the bad joke delivery mechanism to a pub trivia event, which is a fun and exciting new concept, if you’re a Shoe reader. I love that Roz hasn’t bothered to actually hire a trivia host and is just kind of reading questions off her phone. She’s not really trying very hard, so why should this guy actually try to come up with the right answer, when he could just deliver a gag calculated to delight 80-year-olds everywhere?

Judge Parker, 5/7/24

Remember “Declan”? I barely do, having mentioned him on this blog exactly once, and while a wine-drunk Abbey hinted during that appearance that maybe someday he and Neddie would get married, apparently Sophie is less enthused. I’m excited that this might be how we get back cold, calculating Sophie, who’s crunched the numbers and determined that Neddie and Declan have not put in enough love-hours to adequately establish a pair-bond worthy of being validated by the state government.

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Gil Thorp, 5/6/24

Milford has its own Native American reservation and, we learn today, its own institution of higher learning. Soon, having accrued all the necessary components of a robust civic life, this high-school sports crazed town simply won’t need the rest of the United States. That’s when Phase 2 begins.

Hagar the Horrible, 5/6/24

“Let me explain! The castle’s main sewer drains into the moat. You probably already have cholera!”

Mary Worth, 5/6/24

Wow, it looks like Meagan didn’t just smooch that waiter to help purge all Wilbur-related thoughts from her mind; she actually wants to see if he’d be a good fit for a long-term relationship! I certainly hope that she, like everyone Wilbur has been even obliquely romantically involved with, invites him to her wedding to really rub his face in it.

Hi and Lois, 5/6/24

That’s … that’s what everybody likes about working form home, Hi. That’s one of the main reasons why people like to work from home!