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Archive: Alice

187

If Curtis starts talking about blogs, it’s over

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Curtis, 10/7/24

While we all like to see a syndicated newspaper comic keep up with times, I’m afraid the occasional bit in Curtis where Curtis faithfully tunes in to his favorite online comic, Dear Ol’ Dad, feels a little out of date, like it’s grounded in the big webcomics boom of the late ’00s and early ’10s. Not that there aren’t still plenty of good online comics, but unless you really go out of your way to follow them (“Dad, can I have $5 a month for the Dear Ol’ Dad Patreon?” “I’m broke, Curtis”), you mostly encounter them appearing at random on your Facebook or Instagram feed. If you’re lucky, they’re cloying panels where blue aliens describe ordinary situations in cutesy circumlocutions; more likely, you get either Off The Mark panels from 2014 that have had the dialogue changed to be racist, or horrifying AI slop where a crying soldier is eating dog food out of a can while dozens of children with too many fingers point and laugh at him, and the caption is “Best Comic Funny [three cry-laughing emojis].” I’m assuming what Curtis is enjoying is the latter.

Slylock Fox, 10/7/24

I think it’s funny that the text makes clear that this is an enlarged photo of Slick Smitty. The strip wants you to know that the new animal society is fully capable of producing normal-sized photos, OK? They just chose not to in this case, for some reason.

Alice, 10/7/24

Reading this panel left-to-right was fun because at first I thought, “Ha ha, it’s funny because Alice is in desperate financial straits,” but then I got to the ATM and was like “AHH AHHH IT HAS LIPS AND A TONGUE WHY ARE THEY THAT COLOR WHY IS THE TONGUE FLAPPING AROUND LIKE THAT AHHHHH”

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Don’t even get me STARTED on why we don’t celebrate on May 1 like everyone else

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Gil Thorp, 9/2/24

Happy Labor Day, everybody! I guess it’s now an annual tradition for a continuity strip character to appear as Rosie the Riveter to promote the American labor movement. I’m going to take this opportunity to be a bit of a killjoy and point out that the now-iconic “We Can Do It!” poster was actually a piece of internal propoganda produced by Westinghouse Electric in 1942 in an attempt to get its employees to work harder; another poster from the same series provides pretty good evidence of where on the labor/capital divide the ultimate sympathies of the campaign lay. “We Can Do It!” was not associated with the “Rosie the Riveter” concept at the time, was not widely seen outside Westinghouse during the war, and was largely forgotten until the Washington Post Magazine did an article about patriotic wartime art in 1982. Much more famous at the time — and perhaps more in tune with the labor movement — was Norman Rockwell’s 1943 Rosie the Riveter cover for the Saturday Evening Post, which features Rosie chowing down on a sandwich on her lunch break while grinding a copy of Mein Kampf under her foot. Perhaps we can get Abbey Spencer or Sarah Morgan to do this pose next year.

Alice, 9/2/24

Most cartoonists are of course more interested in making jokes about “Ha ha, we call it Labor Day but nobody’s working” than they are exploring and celebrating advances in workers’ rights, of course, which is kind of funny considering most cartoonists are freelancers who don’t get paid holidays of any sort. Hey, Alice, maybe instead of lying around all day you should organize your workforce!

Hi and Lois, 9/2/24

I know the whole dynamic of the Thurstons’ marriage is that Irma is perpetually enraged about her husband’s laziness, but he very much does have a job that he goes to every weekday with Hi. Like, that’s an important part of the strip lore. He’s also not unionized, as he’s management (I’m basing this on the fact that he wears a tie to the office, but I think given the lingering 1950s aesthetic that’s a pretty good rubric), so maybe this is just further topical commentary.

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Dennis should be into Charlie XCX, he’s been in his brat era since 1951

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Dennis the Menace, 8/14/24

Despite the fact that she’s a long-running fixture in a 73-year-old comic strip, I don’t think Margaret has a particularly consistent set of characterizations — she’s usually whatever she needs to be in the “vaguely prissy” range to annoy Dennis — but today’s panel honestly feels tonally off to me. I don’t buy that she would be expressing overt jealousy of Taylor Swift, and I don’t buy that she would just call her “Swift.” (I also don’t buy that as a drawing of Taylor Swift, but that’s neither here nor there.) Dennis in his interactions with Margaret similarly seems to take on whatever qualities are necessary to antagonize her, but I am intrigued by the implication that he’s set off Margaret’s rant because he’s such a dedicated Swiftie.

Gil Thorp, 8/14/24

Traditionally we have been treated to Gil Thorp’s thrice-annual ritual recitation of the names, so we can all pretend to know who the players are as their season develops. But in this new fast-paced era, the kids just get little floating labels instead. I’m particularly intrigued by “Torch,” who I assume is an X-Men-style mutant who has the power to control fire, or possibly just a notorious arsonist. Either way, seems like an exciting football season is ahead of us!

Alice, 8/14/24

A lot of middling comics could do a strip where two people talk about how modern appliances today have too many features and none of them work right, hur hur hur. But to have two people talking about how modern appliances today have too many features and none of them work right, while said appliance sits between the two people and makes direct and coquettish eye contact with the audience, with its weird creepy face? That’s the deranged Alice difference that keeps me coming back.