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Archive: Crock

147

Saturday praise

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Crock, 6/21/25

Not sure if we’re seeing a singular mind at work here or if this is the product you’d expect to get from someone who’d been writing a comic for 20 years by 1997 and had arrived at a specific creative/cultural milieu as a result, but insulting someone by referring to their leadership style as “real barf” is extremely funny to me. Since this blog is like 20-25% hatred of Crock by volume, I think you know that I’m being very sincere here. “Real barf”: real funny.

The Lockhorns, 6/21/25

I do praise The Lockhorns a lot, so perhaps it’s lost its oomph when I do it now, but I also think this meh joke is elevated by the way Leroy is holding that bowl of burnt (?) coal slaw aloft, like Hamlet contemplating Yorick’s skull.

Blondie, 6/21/25

Hmm, what’s that, Dagwood? You were in the middle of preparing a midnight snack, but then you just dozed off face-first into the sandwich you were making, capturing in one sad moment your terribly disordered relationship to both food and sleep? And yet you claim to be perfectly happy in the situation, thus encapsulating the vibe your character has been giving off on the comics pages for decades now? Interesting. Interesting.

122

Good strips Saturday

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The Lockhorns, 6/14/25

Once, not long after we moved to Los Angeles, we were driving with friends through a historic neighborhood in Pasadena, full of Craftsman-style homes with neat, well-tended lawns, and we turned a corner and suddenly saw an utterly horrifying looking creature — Google Image Search would later confirm that it was a coyote with some kind of condition that had caused all of its hair to fall out — taking a big dump smack in the middle of one of said lawns, in broad daylight. It made eye contact with us and had the exact same expression on its face that Leroy has here, which is why I have to dub this Lockhorns one of the greatest ever made.

Mary Worth, 6/14/25

How are Wilbur and Dawn handling the fallout from the Belle Situation? Well, they’re sitting in pitch darkness, binging on fast food, and telling each other stories about all the terrible relationships they’ve had with dangerous, abusive people. This is … healthy behavior on their part, maybe? Healthier than usual? Less unhealthy?

Crock, 6/14/25

It’s crazy to call Crock an “innovator,” but this strip is from 1997, before most people had ever used the internet, and yet it manages to perfectly capture the experience of being online: you log on, and you get hit in the face with a bunch of water. Pretty sure all comic strips about the web in the subsequent 28 years have been downhill from this.

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Hell is for children

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Luann, 6/9/25

Back when I was last reading Luann regularly, a decade ago, the whole deal with Toni’s niece Shannon was that she was a hellion but that was mostly because her dad, Toni’s brother, was a flaky, neglectful actor who was always dumping his daughter with his sister with little or no notice so he could do cool actor stuff. Well, Shannon’s still a hellion, but now apparently her dad isn’t neglectful at all, but is rather a dedicated dad who knows his daughter is the most important thing in his life, and also his acting career is going nowhere so honestly why not pay attention to his daughter, I guess. Not sure what Shannon’s excuse is for her irritating behavior anymore!

Crock, 6/9/25

Nobody seems to have ever produced a detailed timeline of Crock’s characters and lore, and I must confess that, despite my authority within the world of newspaper comics, I don’t have all the details either. I’m not sure when Grossie and Maggot’s beloved (?) son Otis made his debut in the strip; was this installment, which apparently ran in 1997 according to the copyright date, the one that heralded his coming, or is this some other kid, who they (as the dialogue heavily implies) ate?

Slylock Fox, 6/9/25

We humans read the hints in Slylock Fox about the great Uprising that heralded the animalpocalypse and shudder at thoughts of the bloodbath, with the suddenly uplifted animals dishing out brutal revenge for a thousand centuries of abuse at the hands of H. sapiens. Less explored, but certainly germane, is the animal-on-animal battle that must’ve ensued in the aftermath as the beasts fought with one another for access to the humans’ stuff. Perhaps the first rudimentary animal legal codes were developed on the fly to resolve such conflicts peaceably, with Slylock and Max still occasionally tasked with enforcing the Rule of Finders Keepers, the oldest law the animals respect.