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Shoe, 1/25/25

I was going to go on a riff here about the circumstances under which a lawyer might have to quickly shift from shoes-off relaxation to professional client acquisition mode, but you know what, I’m going to keep my eyes on the prize here: he’s a bird! He can fly! He should be flying after that ambulance, that’s by far the most efficient way to chase it! C’mon!

Pluggers, 1/25/25

I was going to go on a riff here about how I still think of seat warmers as kind of a luxury feature and it’s interesting to see famously frugal and non-elite pluggers casually using one in place of a heating pad you can get for $15 at CVS, but you know what, I’m going to keep my eyes on the prize here: that’s clearly how you would draw the panel if your original joke was about pluggers farting in their cars and then your editor was like “No, sorry, too gross,” but you were on deadline and you had to figure out how to use the same art for something else.

Bizarro, 1/25/25

Aw, I think it’s cute how sad the ghost on the right looks! I mean, I would be too if I died and found out I still had to “make plans” and “set goals.” Not doing any of that shit would be the #1 best thing about being dead!

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/10/25

Ha ha, can you imagine? The Smif and Barlow families would be lined up opposite each other, and Steve Harvey would shout out, “Things you carry home in a burlap sack!” And Barlow would buzz in first and smugly shout “Chickens!” but while he’s distracted, Snuffy jumps over the podium and charges at him with a rusty blade he had hidden in his overalls, eager to slit Barlow’s throat and finally declare victory in their long-running clan war, right there on national television. The little bastard doesn’t understand that TV shows aren’t broadcast live, but the footage will leak out anyway. It’s too sensational not to.

Bizarro, 1/10/25

Hey, did you know that the millions of toner cartridges and batteries we’ve produced over the past few decades all have souls? Or maybe they are the souls of the electronic equipment we stick them inside, I’m not 100% that I follow the cosmology here, but the point is we’re going to be encountering this stuff when we die and move on to the next world, and I think it’s going to have some questions for us that I for one am not sure I’ll be able to answer.

Dennis the Menace, 1/10/25

You know what’s real menacing behavior, Gina? Carrying around a 5 x 7 wedding picture of your parents outside in the middle of winter while you tell people about this. What if you drop it in the snow?

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Crock and The Phantom, 10/21/24

One of my longest-running bits on this blog is pointing out strips where the colorists have very clearly not read the comic before doing their work on it. I feel like this doesn’t happen as often as it used to, but it does still happen, like in this Crock, where that “golden” shovel is glowing and yet is still clearly made of wood and steel.

I assume that this happens in part because the strips aren’t sent to the colorists with any explicit instructions on what colors should go where. That’s an even bigger problem in cases where the color is important but you can’t necessary get it from context. Like, is this being emerging from the Avarice rover in today’s Phantom, who bears an uncanny similarity to Elon Musk, supposed to be Ian Mollusk himself? Or is it a robot that looks like Ian Mollusk, one made in the mad annoying inventor’s image, and therefore the human-like flesh coloring he’s been given is actually in error?

Bizarro, 10/21/24

A quick recap of some Josh Deep Lore: did I get a college degree in classics, and then get a subsequent master’s degree as part of an abortive attempt to become an historian of ancient Rome? Yes! Was this a mistake? It was! Do I regret having done it? Sometimes! Did they even cover Greek mythology in my coursework? Not really! Nevertheless, I feel qualified to say that this panel has the Medusa thing all wrong. This dumb hippie should be turned to stone! He’s looking right at her! She turns people to stone because she’s so hideous looking; it’s not a superpower she can just turn and off. Are you telling me that this won’t work on hippies, because they reject society’s rules about who’s beautiful and who’s ugly, or because they’re very, very high?

Zits, 10/21/24

A thing about getting old is that you do get to see mores change, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill, but it always creates a little mental dissonance. For instance, a Zits anthology published a full five years after I started doing this blog noted that the comic got pushback from the syndicate whenever it used the word “sucks” in dialogue. And now here it is using the word “horny,” in front of God and everybody! Hopefully I don’t sound like an “old fuddy duddy,” but I think everyone involved in creating a Zits strip with the word “horny” in it should go to prison.