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Alice, 4/15/24

I’m happy to report that, sine I started reading Alice a few weeks ago, I have fallen thoroughly, 100% under its spell. This strip takes perfectly ordinary situations, like when you receive parrot medicine from beloved novelist and short story writer Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) but are then unable to give it to your parrot because it flies away, and turns them into delightfully surreal episodes. Ha ha, that parrot does not want to take that medicine! Also Alice (?) is … flying? And her head …. looks like that? Anyway! Alice, I don’t fully “get it” but I’m keenly interested to see what it’s doing next!

Crock, 4/15/24

Look, man, I get what you’re going for here and it’s basically cute and whimsical, but maybe don’t have your characters stumble upon a field of hacked-off human extremities rotting in the desert sun if your comic set is against the backdrop of grinding colonial insurgency, OK? Just … trust me on this one.

The Phantom, 4/15/24

So this current Phantom storyline, it turns out, is about Kit Jr. joining the Ghost Who Walks on one of his adventures, so we can all find out if he really has it what it takes to step up, become the 22nd Phantom, the ultimate jungle warrior and seemingly immortal crime fighter, and fulfill the destiny he was born and bred for. Anyway, turns out he definitely does not have what it takes! He’s just going to get strangled with a chain by some low-level henchman wearing a tank top, because he wasn’t paying attention, like a dumbass.

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Family Circus, 4/9/24

The “fun” of a Dolly Family Circus gag, to the extent that such a thing exists, is often about the gap between her smug, know-it-all affect and her actual knowledge; we see, in a single panel, both her hubris and her comeuppance. The other stock Dolly joke is just her tattling on someone, which is even less fun. Today’s panel is of the first variety, but I’m sorry, this is barely a darnedest thing we’re dealing with here — “hitter” and “header” sound very close or even identical in many English dialects, including in the Baltimore-Philly corridor that is the Keane clan’s ancestral home, and you easily can see why the sense confusion between the two words arises in this context. Sorry, I will not be cruelly mocking an innocent child for this one! (Open to cruelly mocking her at other times, especially in the tattletale strips.)

Crock, 4/9/24

It’s wild that this strip was written probably in like 2004 and was extremely incorrect in its terminology usage then, but today if you just changed “iPod” to “AirPod” it would be exactly right and probably along the lines of what the author was originally thinking of. If we went back and analyzed all the old strips, would we find that Crock was prescient of coming trends? No, absolutely not, why would even think that, get outta here.

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Family Circus, 2/18/24

“Oh, hey, does my toddler have a bunch of friends who I don’t know, who somehow got into the house without me having noticed? Sure, that makes sense. I can sort of visualize what they might look like. I’m definitely giving him extra cookies.”

Gasoline Alley, 2/18/24

So it turns out that the news story that the characters of Gasoline Alley have been reacting to with universal horror and disgust is that they’re going to incorporate cicada protein into bananas. And they’re right to strongly reject this! It’s very gross.

Crock, 2/18/24

Look, not to sound like a crazy libertine degenerate or anything, but I think it’s OK to say that most newspaper comics readers have always been adults, that basically no kids are reading newspaper comics anymore, and that it ought to be OK for them to use the word “cocaine.”