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Shoe, 5/17/16

As America’s #1 Blogger Who Thinks The Bird-People Of Shoe Should Behave More Like Actual Birds, my immediate reaction upon reading this strip was to Google “can birds digest gluten?” While evidence is inconclusive, by which I mean I couldn’t find anything on the first page of results, I did learn about “angel wing syndrome,” which, according to a web page with disturbing pictures I found on the Internet, is when baby birds eat too much bread because people like to feed bread to adorable baby birds, and as a result their wings don’t develop properly. But are underdeveloped wings only the first stage in the bird de-evolution caused by eating processed carbohydrates? Is this colony of grotesque bird-people, featherèd and beakèd but also clothèd and handèd, simply the result of too much gluten? Is Roz’s customer not a goof on current dietary fads, but rather a brave soul trying to set her children free of the trap from which her generation can never escape?

Crock, 5/17/16

Hey, guys, remember when Crock’s creator’s son decided he didn’t want to do the strip anymore, back in 2012, and there was going to be maybe a couple years of reruns and that was it? Welp, it’s 2016 and Crock is still happening, at least on King Features’ website, and who knows if its in repeats or what. Like, a beeper joke would be about 20 years out of date, but a lot of jokes in Crock seemed 20 years out of date even when new strips were being produced, so! Anyway, assuming this is a repeat, it’s a good example how the passage of time can totally change the effect of a piece of art: whereas in 1995 or whatever the point of this strip would have been “Ha ha, the kids today, they take their beepers with them everywhere,” today it serves as a eulogy for an important technology that was rapidly displaced before it had a chance to become truly ubiquitous.

Hi and Lois, 5/17/16

Irma’s tragedy is that the day when the American suburb was a hotbed of sexual experimentation has long passed, but the ennui of suburban alienation has endured.

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Crock, 4/6/16

Ha ha, “downloading” is definitely a word related to computers in some way, and “the recycle bin” is definitely part of the desktop metaphor used in the popular Windows operating system! “Download that to the old recycle bin,” that’s what the kids say, when they’re surfing on their PCs and such. Hilarious! In other news, due to the inexorable march of mechanical efficiency, this domesticated camel is no longer needed by its human masters, and so it will be released into the wild to inepty fend for itself, or possibly just killed so its carcass can be processed for a number of industrial uses.

Judge Parker, 4/6/16

Speaking of the inexorable march of efficiency, I’m very excited to hear that Neddy’s half-baked plan to out-compete Chinese labor by extracting the last few useful labor-hours out of government-subsidized old people has now become a “movement.” And look in that gleam in Foster Chubb’s eyes! This is a man who thought he could grift the Spencer-Parkers with comically stagy wound dressings, so sure, he’s 100% on board with this “groundswell of support” that will somehow defeat basic economics.

Six Chix, 4/6/16

Definitely if I had died, and my immortal soul had been misplaced in some mysterious subvoid for an uncountable age, and then I was yanked out of that only to be shepherded into an even more unknowable afterlife, that’s the dazed, terrified expression I’d have on my face.

Hi and Lois, 4/6/16

Hey guys, uhhhhhh, it turns out Trixie can read? This has a number of unsettling implications that I’m reasonably sure aren’t going to be pursued.

Mary Worth, 4/6/16

“I mean, I could tell after one class that Harlan Jones doesn’t know jack shit about art history, and he still got a job here, so there must be something to it!”

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Crock, 3/30/16

Crock may be the only comic that I’ve antagonized so much that they felt a need to do a genuinely mean-spirited strip about me, but at least I am familiar with long-running Crock jokes and traditions, which is more than I can say for the people paid actual money to help produce it for publication. Captain Preppy, for instance, is an egomaniac who likes to gaze at himself in a handheld mirror while talking about how great he is. This is well-established Crock canon. Yet somebody looked at a black-and-white version of today’s strip and said, “He’s a holding a corndog, right? Looks like a corndog. Let’s check out the dialogue in panel two. ‘Boy, am I lucky.’ Yep, that’s the sort of thing that someone holding a corndog would say. God, I wish I had a corndog right now! Anyway, paintcan tool, pick corndog brown off the color chart, bloop, bloop, bloop. Done! On to Curtis! Wonder what he’s eating.”

Judge Parker, 3/30/16

Haha, Mrs. Chubb folded immediately after like 30 seconds of fairly mild questioning from Sam. Just goes to show that if you’re going to run a sordid fake-accident-injury scam, do not enlist as your accomplice a woman for whom pearls are part of her casual, lounging-around-the-house wear. She will be far too classy to commit.

Archie, 3/30/16

Jesse Ventura ran for governor in 1998, which I guess offers some solid evidence for when the current run of Archie strips were originally written. I certainly hope that nobody was misled by this strip into thinking that Greco-Roman wrestling was a flashy, high-profile road to fame and eventual political glory.

Mary Worth, 3/30/16

“Hmm, what should I wear for my first day of class? I know: pants, a suit jacket, and a vest, all precisely the same shade of green!” –A guy who thinks about art and aesthetics, like, professionally