Archive: Crock

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Crock, 12/16/23

The infancy story in the Gospel of Matthew is the one that mentions the Magi, and while it specifies three different gifts they brought to the baby Jesus (gold, frankincense, and myrrh), it doesn’t actually say how many people brought that stuff, and while there are three kings included in most nativity scenes, there’s nothing canonical about that number. So, who’s the smart guy now, eh, Seymour?

Family Circus, 12/16/23

Jeffy, what are you wearing? Did you come to be dumb and belligerent at this mall Santa right after doing a standup set at Caroline’s in 1988?

Hi and Lois, 12/16/23

I gotta say that I really appreciate the facial expressions and body language on Dot and Ditto here. They’re devastated! Christmas is ruined!

Mary Worth, 12/16/23

Sonia and Brad love nothing more than fighting the system, a system that includes cattle ranching and taking your hat off indoors. Keith, on other hand, loves the system, and would never violate any aspect of it, especially America’s precious trademark laws, which keep our beloved franchised fast-food restaurants safe from repetitional harm.

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Crock, 12/14/23

Not that I will ever give up on my long-running feud with Crock, but even I have to admit that this is a decent joke. Sure, in order for it to really work for you, you have to know a little about the characters and understand that Captain Preppie’s whole bit is that he’s handsome and egotistical, but for my sins, I am someone who does in fact understand Captain Preppie’s whole bit, so it does, in fact, work for me. Sometimes you just have to give the devil his due (in this analogy, the syndicated newspaper comics strip Crock stands in for the Adversary, the Lord of Lies himself).

Dick Tracy, 12/14/23

I was about to do a riff here about how today’s Dick Tracy is aimed at the fairly narrow audience of people who like to erotically ruminate on the prospect of being bested in combat by Cate Blanchett weilding a rare book case in one hand and an épée in the other, but honestly that doesn’t seem like a particularly narrow audience now that I think about it. It’s probably significantly broader than the audience for the Dick Tracy comic strip, if we’re being honest.

Pluggers, 12/14/23

I’m on the record as being cranky when Pluggers just generalizes the long-contested definition of a plugger into “pluggers are old”, so I appreciate today’s strip, which tells us that pluggers are old and also their refrigerators are more disgusting than you could possibly imagine.

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Crock, 12/2/23

Today’s Crock is just a real rollercoaster and I feel like I have to document my approximate emotional state as it unfolded:

PANEL 1: Wait, a snowflake? In “winter”? In the Saharan Desert? No, absolutely not. And he’s talking about this as if it’s a regular occurence? Insane. Madness.

PANEL 2: Oh ha ha, have you heard that the mysterious nation of “China” has developed a relatively low-cost and acceptable-quality manufacturing sector, upending the traditional nature of global trade? Oh, what’s that, you had heard that? Because it’s not 1997 anymore, so actually you’re pretty well aware of it? Well, OK, I gue–JESUS CHRIST that is enormous, I don’t know WHAT it is but it is NOT a SNOWFLAKE

PANEL 3: Wow, wow, Figowitz is the most put-upon sad sack in the entire canon of Crock, and yet here he is, the first Crock character to receive a message from God Himself. Surely this direct communion with the Divine will change his life and put him on the road to happin–oh, huh, the snowflake melted. Guess it really was a snowflake and they really were in the Sahara after all, whaddya know.

Pluggers, 12/2/23

No rollercoaster here; I don’t care that this panel isn’t a “joke” per se and doesn’t really get us any closer to the answer to the age-old “What is a plugger?” question, I just love it because it’s a bear-man staring in trepidatious disgust at a frankly enormous clod of shit on his shoe. That’s what art is, to me, and I encourage newspapers to keep printing it.