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Blondie, 2/20/17

The Singularity is a sci-fi idea that’s bled over into futurist circles (or maybe vice-versa, I can’t remember). Basically, it’s a prediction based on the increasing rate of technological change: someone who lived in, say 100,000 BC would feel right at home in 10,000 BC, and even someone from 200 AD would be able to understand the world of 1200 AD pretty easily. But around the time of the industrial revolution, new technologies started emerging and changing society fast enough that we could see their impacts within a human lifetime, and the rate of change is increasing in disorienting ways. The Singularity is the moment when the graph spikes to infinity, when tech changes so quickly that it’s impossible for us today to understand what our society on the other side of it would look like. Maybe our minds will transcend our physical existence, or maybe we’ll be wiped out by the superintelligent machines we create. A lot of critics have poked holes in the theory, calling it “the rapture of the nerds,” and I tend to agree with them, but you can really see the underlying mechanism at work in this strip. You can tell that the idea is “it’s fun to have children tell jokes about new-fangled technology,” and the writer thinks mass emails are a new-fangled technology. Simple, right? Just nobody tell him that no eight-year-old has ever used email in their life. They’re all on … YikYak now? Is that right? Kids love YikYak?

Family Circus, 2/20/17

I guess the joke here is that … sometimes driver’s license photos are out of date? Like, probably Thel’s was taken before any of her kids were born? And they think that’s funny? Honestly the real lesson here is that these poor children, cloistered behind the barbed-wire-topped walls of the Keane Kompound, are desperately starved for any form of entertainment.

Dick Tracy, 2/20/17

Last week as Dick and the Spirit got ready to head into battle, our masked guest star demurred when Dick offered him a gun. Bad choice, Spirit! You’re over there spending all this energy wresting a bad guy to the ground while Dick just up and shot the Brush in the face!

Marvin, 2/20/17

Ha ha, it’s funny because Marvin is smug about sitting out in the snow with a diaper full of frozen urine! Jokes on you, kid: notice how we don’t see your parents anywhere? That’s because they’ve left you out there in the cold, to die!

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Blondie, 2/17/17

I feel like the moment when Dagwood stopped being just a generic white collar worker at Dithers Industries and started being referred to as an “office manager” happened within living memory — like, maybe even since I started doing this blog. And while it’s true that specificity is generally a good thing in jokes, nothing about Dagwood’s intermittently depicted job duties ever matches up with that description; he never seems to be, say, budgeting for office supplies or figuring out who should sit where or designing filing systems. Instead, he prepares “reports” about “accounts” and deals with “clients,” all of which seems outward-facing and outside his job duties. Perhaps today’s strip explains all that, though, if “office manager” is just code for “person who services our clients, sexually, then prepares detailed reports that we use for blackmail purposes.”

Slylock Fox, 2/17/17

Obviously that’s supposed to be a fan tail at the bottom of our mysteriously four-limbed lobster’s torso here, but for the life of me it looks like pleated material of a skirt. Basically, that’s what I’m going to imagine it is, shielding the dangling lobster junk from our field of vision.

Pluggers, 2/17/17

Pluggers also realized why many texting conversations didn’t go as expected when informed that “FML” does not stand for “friend: make love?”

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Mary Worth, 2/9/17

Oh, hey, by the way, Iris has been dumping Zak in slow motion this whole week, and he still hasn’t realized it’s happening! I certainly hope this draws out as long as possible:

“We had some great times together, and I don’t regret any of it!”

“Neither do I!”

“I realize, though, we live very different lives…”

“We sure do! They say variety’s the spice of life!”

“It’s just … I think we maybe should see other people.”

“Ha ha! I’m seeing another person right now! He’s right behind you! Hi mister, I see you!”

Blondie, 2/9/17

Dagwood immediately effacing his identity out of self-loathing and shame over his own wholly merited reputation for workplace incompetence is probably the saddest thing I’ve ever seen him do in this strip, and I’ve seen him breakdance with joy because he didn’t have to go eat at someone else’s house.

Slylock Fox, 2/9/17

The deranged, half-starved castaway in the drawing on the left wants to eat the bird. In the drawing on the right, he wants to make love to it.