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Crock, 10/25/24

Of all the characters in the comics, few are subject to as much indignity as Crock’s Grossie. I mean, forgetting the fact that she’s named “Grosse” and married to a guy named “Maggot,” we must also keep in mind that she’s a colonial subject, and while she’s usually depicted as fairly fiesty and independent, she is also, like her nation, under the heel of the French and must obey their whims. Not sure what’s worse for her here: that she had to participate in the operation of this sham restaurant that’s been set up as part of an elaborate bit about what a bad cook she is, or that she’s probably going to be killed by her own countrymen when they storm the fort, just because she’s in the way.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/25/24

Hey, remember when Wanda first showed up in this strip, as a waitress who was flirting with Mud Mountain Murphy, but then Mud turned out to be kind of an asshole who pretended to shit his pants on stage, so she hooked up with Truck instead, because he was her only other option? Well, now that Mud’s been brainwashed by a con artist, who accidentally made him a better person in the process, Wanda seems eager to get Mud back into her and Truck’s lives. What I’m saying is, I look forward to discovering if Rex Morgan, M.D., can make polyamory boring.

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Crock and The Phantom, 10/21/24

One of my longest-running bits on this blog is pointing out strips where the colorists have very clearly not read the comic before doing their work on it. I feel like this doesn’t happen as often as it used to, but it does still happen, like in this Crock, where that “golden” shovel is glowing and yet is still clearly made of wood and steel.

I assume that this happens in part because the strips aren’t sent to the colorists with any explicit instructions on what colors should go where. That’s an even bigger problem in cases where the color is important but you can’t necessary get it from context. Like, is this being emerging from the Avarice rover in today’s Phantom, who bears an uncanny similarity to Elon Musk, supposed to be Ian Mollusk himself? Or is it a robot that looks like Ian Mollusk, one made in the mad annoying inventor’s image, and therefore the human-like flesh coloring he’s been given is actually in error?

Bizarro, 10/21/24

A quick recap of some Josh Deep Lore: did I get a college degree in classics, and then get a subsequent master’s degree as part of an abortive attempt to become an historian of ancient Rome? Yes! Was this a mistake? It was! Do I regret having done it? Sometimes! Did they even cover Greek mythology in my coursework? Not really! Nevertheless, I feel qualified to say that this panel has the Medusa thing all wrong. This dumb hippie should be turned to stone! He’s looking right at her! She turns people to stone because she’s so hideous looking; it’s not a superpower she can just turn and off. Are you telling me that this won’t work on hippies, because they reject society’s rules about who’s beautiful and who’s ugly, or because they’re very, very high?

Zits, 10/21/24

A thing about getting old is that you do get to see mores change, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill, but it always creates a little mental dissonance. For instance, a Zits anthology published a full five years after I started doing this blog noted that the comic got pushback from the syndicate whenever it used the word “sucks” in dialogue. And now here it is using the word “horny,” in front of God and everybody! Hopefully I don’t sound like an “old fuddy duddy,” but I think everyone involved in creating a Zits strip with the word “horny” in it should go to prison.

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Crock, 8/23/24

An interesting phenomenon in the daily comics is that often during the strip’s genesis, the creators come up with an odd conceit or bit that is genuinely funny at the time, but then the strip runs for literal decades and they want to do jokes that are not about that bit, using the characters and scenarios they’ve established that are based around the bit, which produces odd results. Shoe forgetting its characters are all birds is a prime example. Crock is in an even weirder boat, where Grossie and Maggot’s son Otis (whose name I could not for the life of me remember for the longest time, and Google was no help, and every once in a while I check out to see if ChatGPT can do the thing it claims it can do, and it told me his name was either “Mongoose” or “Qaddafi,” so no, it very much cannot do the thing it claims it can do) is best friends with a vulture. Indeed, the vulture is his only friend, which is why he’s excited to talk with him about what he’s learned about human reproduction. However, this joke, which would be mildly funny if it were part of a conversation between two normal human children, becomes profoundly weird when it’s part of a conversation between a normal human child and a talking vulture. Like, if you knew talking vultures existed, maybe you’d find the idea that storks delivered babies more plausible! On the flipside, if you were a talking vulture and you heard this story about storks, you might have some inside information on storks and their ways that could confirm or deny the details. Anyway, I’m dwelling on all this because the alternative is thinking about how not long before the action in this strip occurred, a vulture dad told his vulture son about vulture sex in great anatomical detail, and I’m not doing any research on vulture reproduction but I’m just going to go ahead and assume that the whole process is pretty gross.

Beetle Bailey, 8/23/24

Great, just great, I read this comic and immediately felt the absolutely 100% useless piece of information “Private Blips is a Swiftie” falling into place in my brain. Sorry, spare set of keys! I will never remember where you are now. That slot is taken.