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Shoe, 5/28/16

FUN FACT ABOUT WHAT A NERD I AM: I read this punchline and for a brief moment thought it was a joke about the UK’s notoriously lax libel laws, instead of what it actually is, which is a joke about how Shoe has lots of ex-wives who hate him, haw haw. Meanwhile, here’s a question for discussion: are they talking about the normal human-ruled England we know and love, or some in-universe bird-ruled England, with a bird queen and a bird Prime Minister and a bird Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer and a Parliament that’s knee deep in bird shit?

Blondie, 5/28/16

You have to almost admire Dagwood’s phone shouting technique, in which he holds the phone directly in front of his face and shouts into it as loudly as he can. You also have to admit that if you were an ISP employee or NSA spy and were snooping around someone’s email, you’d probably expect a conversation with pete@porkapalooza.com to be at least mildly sexually titillating.

Judge Parker, 5/28/16

I can’t tell if this is yet another example of “ancillary characters in Judge Parker sacrifice to make the insanely wealthy protagonists even richer,” or if Neddy is so insanely wealthy that she just has no idea what an actual normal salary looks like.

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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.