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Crock, 6/22/17

I like the black smoke rising in the background of the strip; it implies that Poulet’s defeat has had devastating consequences, but gives you room to fill in the blanks about their exact nature. Has some Algerian village been reduced to a smoldering ruin by insurgents because the inhabitants were too accommodating to the foreign occupiers who, when it came down to it, were unable to protect them? Was the Legion’s fort overrun by rebels and burned to the ground as a hated symbol of French authority? Are Crock and Poulet standing on the quay in Algiers or Oran, awaiting the boat that will evacuate them to the métropole, watching the city burn in an orgy of retaliatory violence as colonial rule collapses into a nightmarish power vacuum? “I wish life had a backspace key!” Poulet quips, referring to 130 years of brutal conquest and exploitation.

Mary Worth, 6/22/17

Haha, whoops, looks like I was wrong and it’s Esme who’s going to be tumbling into the wine-dark sea, never to be seen again. This happened because the ship lurched, so Katie didn’t even have to make a choice or feel morally responsible! Remember, kids, smoking is bad, and so is attempted adultery, and so is violating workplace regulations about sexual relationships with customers. If you do any of those things, you’ll drown, probably!

Family Circus, 6/22/17

Are you asking if Big Daddy Keane has noticed that the forward progression of time has ground to a halt, and that he’s doomed to live an eternity with his children never aging, never growing up and leaving the house, just hanging around and saying the darndest things, forever? Look at his face; I’m pretty sure he’s noticed.

Hagar the Horrible, 6/22/17

Ha ha, it’s funny because Lucky Eddy thought he was going to die in agony, so he pissed himself!

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Mary Worth, 6/6/17

I was going to make some snide comment about how mariachi music is from Jalisco, on Mexico’s Pacific coast, and totally out of place here in the Yucatan, but heck, you can hire a mariachi band for your wedding in Tulum! You can hire a jug band in Staten Island! Cultures are becoming more and more homogenous as people become more mobile, and as global elite tourism demands to be catered to by specific forms of cultural output! Mary and Toby had better get deeply margarita-drunk while wearing sombreros by the end of this storyline, is what I’m trying to say. Meanwhile, it’s sad that Haiti’s rich cultural heritage has was ignored last month in favor of their unfortunate history of accidental bathroom imprisonment.

Beetle Bailey, 6/6/17

What with the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the idea that two men in the military might be involved in a secret S&M relationship no longer holds a transgressive thrill. That’s why Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC has moved on to “jell-offing,” a sexual fetish where someone can only achieve orgasm if his or her genitals are nestled in a slowly curdling blob of delicious JELL-O® brand pudding.

Blondie, 6/6/17

It’s pretty sad that Blondie had to hire top-notch Web designers and food photographers to create an elaborate website like this for her catering business. Taking photos of each and every single dish she offers definitely has diminishing returns as advertising, but I guess it makes her feel better to know that, if Dagwood’s going to spend his time at work masturbating to food pornography, at least he’s masturbating to her food pornography.

Crock, 6/6/17

It’s kind of odd that Otis, who is one of the more frequently used members of Crock’s cast of characters, has been reduced to a tiny, glowering, wordless gnome-thing in this strip. But I guess it’s also odd that he had “Show and Tell” at school and didn’t bring in his best friend, a talking bird who feasts on the rotting flesh of the dead.

Shoe, 6/6/17

nggnnngghghggngn

THERE IS NO HALL

YOU’RE IN A SINGLE ROOM INSIDE A TREE TRUNK

WHY DON’T YOU SAY “DOWN THE BRANCH” OR SOMETHING

JUST ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THEY’RE BIRDS LIVING FULL-TIME IN TREES FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE

GOD DAMN IT

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Blondie and Beetle Bailey, 5/29/17

Memorial Day is supposed to be dedicated to honoring those who died in the service to the United States. As it originally developed in the 1860s, this was generally understood to mean specifically those who died defending the Union in the Civil War, which is why it wasn’t observed in the South until after World War I, but in recent decades the “killed” part is more and more frequently elided until now people mostly treat it as an extra Veterans Day, where you’re supposed to be nice to people in the military generally, like Dag and Blondie are to their neighbor who has a wildly differing anatomy than they do. I can’t decide if Beetle Bailey’s refusal to mention Memorial Day at all is better or worse than Blondie’s take. Perhaps they want to acknowledge that, since Camp Swampy seems to exist in a division of the military completely isolated from any combat activities, none of the characters even know anyone killed in battle, so a Memorial Day strip would be inappropriate.

Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean, 5/29/17

But no matter who we supported during the War of Northern Aggression, we can all agree about one thing when it comes to Memorial Day: grilling is fun! Almost as much fun as contemplating the tangled chronology of the Funkyverse strips, something said strips seem determined to force me to do no matter how little I want to! Today’s strips really bring home the comic book time nature of the Funkyverse’s chronology. If one of us living in the ordinary space-time continuum mentioned “something that happened every year, ten years ago” it would sound like nonsense, but it fits in with the nature of Funky-reality: Funky Winkerbean takes place a decade after Crankshaft, and both strips cycle through the calendar but never actually move forward into the future. The implication that those Centerville explosions stopped around ten years ago is truly chilling, because it means that Crankshaft himself is always on the verge of dying, but his cruel creator will never let him cross over to the other side of the veil.

Crock, 5/29/17

I know that most of us read the colorized comics online these days, but keep in mind that the daily strips are still created with a black-and-white newspaper medium in mind. That means that the original artist punted an important decision to the syndicate coloring staffer today: are we to understand these implements to be made of camel flesh, and thus the same color as the rest of this beast, as the lack of any line at their bases might indicate? Or should they be thought of as metal blades that have burst forth through the camel’s skin and muscle? While the colorist has clearly gone the second route, I’m disappointed that he didn’t follow that idea to its logical conclusion and add copious amounts of blood.

Pluggers, 5/29/17

Pluggers are of course nightmarish man-animal chimeras who realize that they are abominations against God’s law, so obviously they go out of their way to avoid looking at themselves. (I was originally going to write “Ha ha! Pluggers hate their bodies and are full of self-loathing,” which is of course the actual joke of this panel, but then I got too sad.)