Post Content

The Lockhorns, 5/19/22

I’m pretty sure the first legacy comic to do a cryptocurrency joke was, shockingly, Snuffy Smith way back in 2015, although they just did a “bitcoin? what if a coin got bit? Wouldn’t that be funny????” joke. Nobody would ever accuse The Lockhorns of being innovative, but I respect that they wait until something like cryptocurrency has become a fairly well established part of our mental landscape before figuring out exactly how to fit it into its own internal universe. What they came up with is “Leroy has lost much of his paltry savings in the recent crypto crash but still keeps posting ‘HODL’ on Reddit and won’t shut up about crypto at parties,” which is 100% correct and I applaud it.

Blondie, 5/19/22

I was about to make an “Alexander, your father looks literally exactly like you, as if you were not sired by him in the normal human way but rather were grown in a vat from cells containing only his DNA, what possible reason do you have for saying he’s taking away from the quality of your social media,” but upon reflection I think the joke is about him smiling. Is … smiling bad now? Do the kids not smile anymore? Does Blondie, the strip that did a “You know what I miss? Chalkboards” gag two days ago, know more than me about acceptable facial expressions on Instagram? Truly this is one in a series of humbling moments.

Gil Thorp, 5/19/22

Climate change is accelerating, and you can find evidence of it everywhere. For instance, as the traditional saying goes, “Gil starts actually coaching in June, corn be heavy soon.” But it’s only mid-May and he’s already noticed one of his players is blind! Truly we are moving into uncharted territory.

Post Content

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/17/22

Wow, I guess we really are going to get “Snuffy is cruel to his family/Snuff is poor” bits for the rest of the week, huh? Personally, I’m very stuck on poor Loweezy’s face in panel two. I realize that you don’t always feel right as rain after a doctor’s visit, especially from a doctor willing to survive on Medicaid payments and barter, but I’m getting strong and disturbing “Snuffy is bribing Doc Pritchart with an extra stolen chicken in return for poisoning Snuffy’s wife” vibe from it. Think, Snuffy, think! Who’s going to make you cake now?

Blondie, 5/17/22

This is a strip that was clearly created in a white-hot fury by someone who’s just learned that schools don’t use chalkboards anymore and who was so motivated to slam on the dumb kids today that they didn’t even bother finding out what replaced them. Was it texting? Texting, probably? Anyway, in actuality they were replaced by dry-erase whiteboards, something that Dagwood would be pretty familiar with if he worked in an actual office rather than a weird vast open space with shiny floors and the occasional corner.

Dustin, 5/17/22

Much of the job of being a comics curmudgeon involves reading about unpleasant characters over and over and thinking to yourself, “But what specific kind of asshole is this?” In the case of Dustin’s dad, he’s specifically the kind of asshole who doesn’t answer this question with a perfectly reasonably “Yes, please,” or a perfectly reasonable “No, thank you,” but instead with a “Yes, but only so I can experience your culture’s inferiority first hand.”

Post Content

Blondie, 5/15/22

There are, as you might guess because you’re reading these words on a website called “The Comics Curmudgeon,” a number of things that irritate me about the comic strip Blondie, and one of them is that we have been repeatedly told that Dagwood’s job title is “office manager,” despite the fact that he never does any office management and what work activity we do see out of him involves working on “contracts” that seem related to the core business of DithersCo and not about buying office supplies or whatever. And now we’re supposed to believe that there’s someone who’s worked at the company for a while and the office manager doesn’t know him? Perhaps the company is meant, for the purposes of this joke, to be so large that there are multiple office managers, with the people “down the hall” not mingling with Dagwood’s bunch? This makes no sense! I protest, do you hear me? I protest!

Funky Winkerbean, 5/15/22

Gotta respect Funky Winkerbean here: a lesser strip would choose to either make a professional school picture photographer the butt of the joke for not knowing what kids mean when they say “gram,” or this lonely nerd the butt of the joke for having no friends. But this is Funky Winkerbean, where they want you to know that all of their characters, even the walk-ons, are contemptible losers.

Mary Worth, 5/15/22

Wow, it turns out Toby understood exactly what it would take to dissuade Cal from his schoolboy crush: putting him in the nuclear blast zone of Ian’s sexuality. This has sent him scrambling for an age-appropriate partner so he can pretend that he’ll never get old, and Maddie, who happens to be nearby, is the lucky (?) winner!

Panel from The Lockhorns, 5/15/22

Well, this strip’s been running for 54 years, and Loretta has finally “gone there,” by which I mean she has threatened her spouse with murder. “You buy that boat and I’ll kill you and set you and it on fire,” she says. “I’ll fucking do it. It won’t even be in the water, just in our driveway. I’ll be long gone at that point, though, Leroy. Long gone.”