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Blondie, 5/5/16

In Chilean Spanish, a “nuco” is a nocturnal bird, like an owl. So for Mexico’s Cinco de Mayo celebration, Dag’s diner is serving up grilled Chilean owl. I would’ve gone with the sea bass.

Six Chix, 5/5/16

Somehow the passive aggression just makes the bossiness worse.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/5/16

Hutch was firstborn, for sure.

Pluggers, 5/5/16

Pluggers send their grandkids homemade porn.

Wizard of Id, 5/5/16

Yes, like the Wiz is exhausting that adorable little fart in the last panel there.

Dick Tracy, 5/5/16

Oh boy, Dick Tracy’s police state is tattooing prisoners now.

In the current thread among so, so, many, goat-goateed Notta Fallar framed Tracy by releasing a video of herself making out with Putty Puss disguised as Tracy. Bluenose Mayor Armstrong suspended him, so he called in a favor from pal Oliver Warbucks, who hired lawyer Mr. Kleen to press Tracy’s case. I was certain Mr. Kleen was going to be an intentionally ironic name for any lawyer who works in Dick Tracy (like Law and Order’s Judge Softon Crime), but nooo – he’s just some guy with a Purell® jones and apparently, a real aversion to legal work.

Zits, 5/5/16

Jeremy Duncan used to have a serious case of the hots for his guidance counselor. Farewell to adolescence, I guess. Who knows what comes next? Not him!

– 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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Blondie, 4/5/16

As part of my mission of putting way, way too much thought into the comics, I put way, way too much thought into Lou’s “here” in the second panel. The joke of not naming a sandwich “bumstead” makes perfect sense, especially when written by a creative team that inherited this name from the 1930s, when it was presumably kind of funny. But what does Lou mean by “here”? Does he have other restaurants? Is the “club” in question not an abstract entity that would grant membership to sandwich fans, but an actual, physical location, like a nightclub, but for sandwiches? Is Dagwood not invited to this nightclub? Is Dagwood the saddest man in the world?

Crankshaft, 4/5/16

Oops, Mary, looks like you found out that you’re the “cool girl” the dudes use as an excuse to shit on other women! You are 100% right to look concerned.