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Crock, 6/13/22

Crock has been in perpetual reruns ever since its creator died and his son decided that doing the thing so many people in this industry do where they continue putting out their father’s strip would be not that much fun, actually, so despite the up-to-date dates on these they were all published years or decades ago. Generally this doesn’t matter much because Crock is “timeless” (detached from any kind of reality as we know it so it can indulge in its elaborately unfunny internal universe) but every once in a while you get a strip like this, with an out-of-nowhere SLAM on some long-irrelevant bit of pop culture detritus. The big question here: is this a wholly justified attack on The Da Vinci Code, the novel from 2003, or on The Da Vinci Code, the movie from 2006? And is its selection as the rerun strip for today meant as an attack on The Da Vinci Code, a stage play that will be running in London for most of this year, or is that just a coincidence? (Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon would, of course, say there are no such thing as coincidences.)

Curtis, 6/13/22

Speaking of out-of-nowhere slams, Curtis has this intermittent running bit where Curtis wildly overestimates the edginess of some webcomic and it feels like a beef with a specific webcomic but I’m not sure which one? I hope they’re aware of Curtis’s laser focus on them, though. I hope they opened the comics pages today and saw Curtis saying to them “Are you just doing Crankshaft jokes? We already have a Crankshaft, buddy, we don’t need you” and felt that burn deep in their soul.

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Beetle Bailey, 3/26/22

Not sure why but my immediate thought upon reading this was that the Halftracks are fairly old and their parents are almost certainly all dead. That adds an extra frisson to this strip, right? General Halftrack looking in horror at his dead parents’ portraits hanging over the toilet? Halftrack Hate Each Other Saturday is really going all in this week.

Crock, 3/26/22

“Computers, Macs, cellphones, and DVDs” — yes, this is a great string of elder-baffling technological advances for a Crock character to use as a punchline. I would’ve ideally liked to have seen an iPad included in there — written as “iPAD” of some reason, obviously — but other than that, really strong work here.

Dennis the Menace, 3/26/22

Damn, looks like Dennis is out here menacing heteronormativity

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Dick Tracy, 3/18/22

Coffyhead claimed that the coffee over at Bean Howz was “stale,” but I think the truth is that, like any addict, his need for coffee stimulation is only getting more intense over time. The stuff for normies that coffee shops sell has to meet the standards of the local health department, and that won’t cut it for him anymore. He’s got to go meet his street-corner “connection,” a guy who’s got a black-market espresso machine set up at Fletcher and Main that does things to a coffee bean that science cannot fully explain and definitely can’t recommend.

Crock, 3/18/22

For a long time, the go-to irritating but correct move when discussing the Cinematic Wollstonecraft-Shelleyverse has been to huffily reply “Actually Frankenstein was the doctor, you’re referring to Frankenstein’s monster” when anyone calls a shambling assembly of corpse parts reanimated by forbidden science “a Frankenstein.” But we’ve been doing this so long that it’s thoroughly played out. I’m urging my fellow pedants to move on to a new focus of correction: pointing out that the Bride, as iconically performed by Elsa Lanchester, was costumed and made up to be strange looking, but was not intended to be seen as “ugly” the way Boris Karloff was as the Monster, and was in fact quite striking and attractive. Therefore, jokes like the one in today’s Crock are based on a false premise. Please join me in this new movement!