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Herb and Jamaal, 5/2/16

Aww, an old friend … like whatever beloved buddy Jamaal killed, cremated, put in that urn, and stone-cold pawned to save on columbarium fees? Watch your back, Herb. Nice to know he’ll visit, though — I guess that’s what old friends are for.

Andy Capp, 5/2/16

Considering all the sexual directions this conversation could have taken, I’m glad it turned out to be about soccer.

Momma, 5/2/16

Am I the only person put off when medical staff say ‘Doctor’ as if There Were Only One? It smacks of status signalling, the way even soi-disant “horizontal” organizations signal their actual hierarchies by calling staff by last names, managers by first, executives by initials or nicknames, and CEOs only as “he” or “she.” OK for employees, I guess, but I’m the doc’s customer, dammit.

Anyway, for years I thought Momma’s surname was Hobbes — with an “e” — because she’s “… solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” I guess “Doctor” will find that out soon enough.

B.C., 5/2/16

Six thousand years ago, just before evolution stopped, moose — even the well-endowed ones — sported delicate little bird-tails that provoked religious zealots into orgies of murderous rage.

– Uncle Lumpy

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Blondie, 4/23/16

There are any number of perfectly good reasons to resent the comic strip Blondie, but the one I’m going with today is that it’s forced me to become familiar with the fact that “He Sheds” are in fact A Thing, as are “She Sheds,” naturally. I guess I don’t resent the concept per se as much as I do the twee terminology. Anyway, now that there’s a TV show about the trend, we can look forward to it spiraling completely out of hand, as it clearly already has for the Woodleys, who apparently thought it was good use of time and energy to dig two or three feet down into their back yard to create a partially subterranean one-man he-shed where Herb can watch baseball in blessed isolation.

B.C., 4/23/16

I’m on the record as being baffled as to why B.C. will go with entirely new art for its highly structured jokes like “Wiley’s Dictionary” or “Advice” or really any of the several gags where the whole point is to provide a minimalist structure within the world of the strip for the characters to deliver some joke that doesn’t really have much to do with the characters or the world of the strip per se. The structure seems like it’s invented specifically as an opportunity to reuse clip art, and drawing a new panel to depict the scene at a new and different angle seems entirely pointless, like meticulously reconstructing a fast food hamburger out of fresh, organic ingredients. I mean, knock yourself out if you really want to do it, I guess, but maybe don’t do it in a way that emphasizes that Curls’s character design is dominated by his grotesque, protruding upper lip.

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Beetle Bailey, 2/5/16

I haven’t really tried, but I imagine that it’s nearly impossible to make a pancake that actually looks like anything other than a collection of circles, so I guess if we’re being realistic it’s impressive that Cookie has managed to create pancakes that look even vaguely like Sarge. However, considering that this is the fantasy world of the comics, where imagination and tiny printing sizes in newspapers are the only constraints, for this strip to work I think they should’ve looked … more obviously like Sarge? I think a lot of people are just going to read this as Cookie offering the soldiers slightly malformed pancakes, grinning broadly, and saying “Chew them good!”, which they might find off-putting. I find it off-putting and I know what the joke is supposed to be.

B.C., 2/5/16

Right, right, so, Thor is the brown-haired one! Pretty bittersweet that I’m finally learning to tell these characters apart as they’re killed off one by one.

Dennis the Menace, 2/5/16

“I don’t know if I want to engage in constant low-level violence on a lawless frontier that encroaches on the land of indigenous peoples, or serve as the right-hand man to a genocidal dictator!”

Gasoline Alley, 2/5/16

“My God, not the scrapbook! Pilot, shake loose the ranger and the boy, fly directly down into the inferno, and kill that bear as hard as you need to — the scrapbook must be rescued unharmed!”

Spider-Man, 2/5/16

ANOTHER VICTORY WON BY THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN