Post Content

Gil Thorp, 2/10/23

Huh, so I guess while Coach Martinez reigns supreme in football, in basketball he must answer to “Coach Kim,” who I assume his delivering his line here with gutting, icy disdain. The coaching hierarchy remains mysterious! Not exactly sure how Luke’s Thorbsession has led to today’s disastrous Valley Tech performance, though. Maybe the team had set aside one practice to master “not throwing the ball to the other team” but Luke never showed up because he was busy powerflexing in the mirror or something.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/10/23

Look, man, I don’t claim to know everything about the gender politics of Hootin’ Holler, but I feel like I’ve spent more time thinking about the worldbuilding of this strip generally than just about anyone else, and I’m confident in saying that the menfolk do not let their wives tag along on fishing trips. The whole point of the fishing trip is to create segregated homosocial spaces, and also avoid being nagged about not having a job. I refute this!

Pluggers, 2/10/23

I stared at this a long time wondering if pluggers think a turtleneck is like a backwards shirt, but I think the joke is just that pluggers’ necks are bigger now than they were 40+ years ago — or, in the case of the plugger on display here, that they now simply have no neck at all.

Post Content

Crock, 2/7/22

Wow, first there’s a good joke in Crock, and now there’s a Crock that does a decent job of showing the mania of self-delusion that overcomes a colonial power when it’s on the verge of realizing it cannot win a war of occupation? What’s next, a second good joke?

Mary Worth, 2/7/22

Wilbur was in remarkably good spirits when his ex got married, but I have to imagine his other ex finding new romance is going to push him over the edge, right? Like he’s got to know this is happening, somehow, either he’s sitting alone at home and suddenly his combover stood straight up on end, or he’s just been watching from the bushes this whole time.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/7/22

“I tried t’ tell her: No outsider is going to come to this impoverished and economically isolated community! She’s going t’ hafta marry a cousin or leave her home forever, same choice as the rest of us face.”

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 1/23/23

Maybe I’m going to get pushback for this by people who are and/or know actual teens, but my take on vaping, setting aside for the moment its purpose as a drug delivery system, is that it’s one of the dorkiest things I encounter in the real world on a regular basis. You’re sucking cotton-candy flavored mist out of an object that looks either like a tiny alto saxophone or something that would’ve been called a “deathstick” in a bad late ’90s cyberpunk movie. Not that a teen should take lessons on being cool from me, a 48-year-old man who blogs about comic strips, but it’s just sad that the Magic the Gathering nerds have internalized that vaping is too cool for them. To be fair, Nick refuses to buy into this dichotomy either, and is happy to share his cool guy vaping bounty with them. Nick seems like an all right dude, to be honest, maintaining his generosity despite the nerds’ rudeness!

Slylock Fox, 1/23/23

For some reason I assumed that the answer to “which way” was going to be a cardinal direction and I was about to pen a screed about how the liberal coastal elitists at Slylock Fox have constructed a mystery where you have to know about the relative locations of the zoo and lake in Central Park. But it turns out the answer relies on knowing which side of the bus the doors are on, and as a transit nerd I’m down with this one.

Honestly, the biggest story here is not Harry Ape robbing yet another bank, but the continued existence of a zoo in a post-animalpocalypse world. I suppose the animals could maintain it with empty cages and habitats as a monument to their former enslavement, but there are other possibilities, and they’re all much darker.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/23/23

You know, for someone who’s dirt poor and also doesn’t really seem to care about living a healthy lifestyle, Snuffy sure visits the doctor a lot! And it occurred to me, looking at this strip, that we often see him in that situation with his shirt off and the top half of his overalls unbuckled, which (a) indicates that a decent amount of thought went into the question of “Given how Snuffy canonically dresses, what would it look like if he had to disrobe?” and (b) is really a blessing, considering how much further they could’ve gone with it.