Post Content

Mother Goose and Grimm, 6/5/19

Just about every animator and cartoonist eventually dabbles with a “Duck Amuck“-style plot where the characters grapple with the nature of their own reality. Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm is a particularly disturbing take, though, with Mother Goose going bug-eyed with panic as she realizes she’s dissolved her beloved dog’s body into nothingness. Only his eyes remain, hanging in mid-air, leading to an important question: are eyes the soul of a cartoon character? Makes you think!

Shoe, 6/5/19

I’m extremely put off by the way Shoe is making direct eye contact with the reader in the second panel, as if to say, “Get it? I, Shoe, the title character in this comic strip, walk around naked at all times, and maybe you’ve been reading this strip for years and just assumed it’s a weird visual quirk that everyone involved in the strip’s production has long forgotten about, but: nope! I’m naked, other characters in this strip wear clothes, I’m violating every in-universe social norm, but they can’t stop me. Nobody can stop me. It’s now official Shoe canon that I’m a sick pervert bird-man who likes making everyone feel uncomfortable, because that’s how I get off.”

Gasoline Alley, 6/5/19

Please sign my change dot org petition to require that every Gasoline Alley strip end with one of the characters saying “Huh?”, thus assuring the reader that they aren’t meant to really understand anything that anybody is saying.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/5/19

WELP HERE IT IS

BARNEY GOOGLE HAS STUMBLED INTO CAMP SWAMPY

IT’S THE COMICS CROSSOVER EVENT THAT NOBODY WANTED OR ASKED FOR BUT WE’RE GONNA GET IT ANYWAY, BY GOD

Post Content

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/31/19

Changes to health care policy are both politically contentious and incredibly complex to implement, with lots of unanticipated results both good and bad. For instance, increasing the number of insured in poor rural communities has documented benefits in terms of improved medical outcomes. But it also results in increased blood feuding! Can the social fabric in our beloved hollers withstand the increase in violent hillbilly-on-hillbilly crime that would inevitably follow in the wake of universal healthcare?

The Lockhorns, 5/31/19

You might be tempted to focus on Leroy’s puzzling assumption that a uniform shape is somehow a sign of a good set of pancakes, but I can’t stop thinking about who these people are and what they’re doing in the Lockhorns’ dining room at what we must assume is breakfast time. My guess is that they finally worked up the nerve to answer a personal ad on the local swingers website, and as their faces clearly show, have experienced an evening of harrowing discovery as a result.

Post Content

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/19/19

Lots of today’s comics are doing special strips for Red Nose Day, but I’m only going mention one because otherwise it’d get pretty repetitive, and that one is going to be Snuffy Smith, because the point of Red Nose Day is to raise money to combat childhood poverty and there are few clearer examples in the comics of children living in poverty than the (literally, desperately) poor children of Hootin’ Holler.

Beetle Bailey, 5/19/19

You have to respect how acutely aware Miss Buxley is of the progress of General Haltrack’s sundowning: she knows that his “I’ve been in the army [X] years” diatribe is good for a solid 10 minutes where she won’t have to do anything but stand there and nod politely, and she’s going get it out of him even if she has to wave the calendar in his fact to start it. You also have to respect the comics colorist who made Halftrack a white-haired old man in the first flashback panel, then realized in the next panel that he was supposed to be young, but didn’t bother going back to fix their earlier mistake.

Family Circus, 5/19/19

Sure, this is a cute comic about how Sam the dog fetches Big Daddy Keane’s slippers and greets Grandma at the door and, uh, takes care of PJ when all the adults are ignoring him or gone altogether, but let’s not neglect Billy’s look of creeping panic in the center panel here. He feels like he has to denigrate Sam’s skills because he’s not good at anything and he’s never going be good at anything, and he knows it.