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Six Chix, 12/3/17

Congratulations, Six Chix: You’ve created a snail-inhabited Christmas cartoon where I have literally no idea what’s going on! Like, the fact that there are anthropomorphized snails in the foreground implies that we’re in a parallel universe where snails are the intelligent, dominant species and have built a civilization that rivals our own. And yet outside they see not a snail-Santa driving his sleigh, but rather a snail in chains apparently used as a beast of burden. Then there’s the combination of obvious alarm about Christmas’s lateness on the part of our snail-speaker — whatever snails’ other evolutionary advantages in this reality, they’re clearly still comically slow — and “not again!” implying that this isn’t the first time the delivery of presents around the globe was entrusted to an individual wildly unsuited to getting the job done in a timely fashion.

Finally, there’s the real question underlying all of this: if there’s such a thing as snail Christmas, that means there was definitely such a person as Snail Christ.But how do you crucify something that doesn’t have any arms?

Crankshaft, 12/3/17

“The gold was just lying around here. Kind of like the dismembered body parts of all the people I ‘murder[ed] in the bookstore.’ Wait, did I say that last part out loud?”

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Gil Thorp, 10/23/17

THE GIL THORP FOOTBALL SEASON STORY SO FAR: The football team is not great, and quarterback “can do some things well,” so Gil’s gonna resort to some classic Milford trickeration, like “the veer,” which I assume is some dumb weirdo formation from the leather helmet era like the wing-T, and which they’ll practice for weeks only to see it work for exactly three plays until their opponents figure out how to stop it, and also it’ll result in the whole offensive line getting concussed, somehow. Anyhoo, I’m a little in love with panel two here, in which Gil attempts to wow his mediocre quarterback with an expansive gesture in the direction of a 2009-vintage netbook where he’s managed to figure out how to make the file folders on his desktop different colors.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/23/17

Oh, right, that’s what happened to Buck’s abusive ex: she went to jail! Briefly, and none of the safeguards that were supposedly put in place actually worked. This continues to be a depressingly accurate depiction of how domestic abusers operate.

Mary Worth, 10/23/17

I think it’s a fantastic touch that Iris imagines Wilbur’s girlfriend as being the same height as him, and with greying hair. Like she’s hung up on on him and even she can’t get her head around this.

Crankshaft, 10/23/17

OH YEAH IT’S FALL AND YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS: CRANKSHAFT IS MAKING JOKES ABOUT PUMPKIN SPICE COFFEE! Anyway, anything that makes Ed Crankshaft so furious can’t possibly be bad, so it’s official: pumpkin spice is extremely good now.

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Hi and Lois, 10/9/17

Fall is here, everybody, and you know what that means: comics doing jokes about leaves changing color for the fall, and those jokes being totally ignored by the syndicate colorists, who just dump a green fill into the leaves as usual, making the strip completely incoherent! Today’s Hi and Lois is even worse in that clearly somebody realized that at least some of the leaves needed to be orange, and so colored the ones falling but left the ones still on the branches a uniform green. Because leaves stay a bright green color until they’re ready to fall off a tree and then immediately turn orange when they detach, right? This reaffirms my belief that the coloring staff all work in some tropical nation with extremely low labor costs and no deciduous trees, or maybe in dank underground prison.

Crankshaft, 10/9/17

Crankshaft has basically the same problem here, except that it has that extra “Crankshaft twist,” i.e., the strip’s title character literally raging against God for His manifest failures.

Sally Forth, 10/9/17

Sally Forth at least got the memo: each leaf should be its own individual color! Unfortunately, it seems they’re working on the assumption that each leaf should be a unique color, which means the colorists quickly ran out of earth tones and had to move onto pastels. Seriously, look at those pink and blue leaves Ted is kneeling amongst. Are those … leaf-shaped marshmallows?

Funky Winkerbean, 10/9/17

In non-leaf news, we can tell that, after a decade, Les is finally moving on from his dead wife Lisa because he’s dumped the labor of organizing her memorial walk onto the local Rotary Club. Sorry, Rotary Club, dead Lisa’s ghost is going to haunt you now! I don’t make the rules!

Mary Worth, 10/9/17

You know where it’s not fall? Beautiful, tropical Colombia, where Wilbur’s hot new Colombian girlfriend is going to introduce him to the wonders of salsa! She’s already introduced him to the wonders of having a girlfriend who wears skin-tight leopard-print pants.