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Six Chix, 7/17/19

I really have to admire the amount of absurd world-building packed into this single panel. What you have here is a very small fishbowl, containing three fish, two of whom are mobsters (right? that’s what the implications of the dark glasses and the … hat and pipe … are supposed to be?), and they’re about to murder fish #3, for winning at cards. This just brings up a whole slew of other questions: What is the point of a criminal gang in a tiny community like a fishbowl, especially if two thirds of the inhabitants are members? What will the all-mafia society look like after poor Vince is killed? Is the (presumable) human owner of this fishbowl, the one who’s going to fish poor Vince out and flush him down the toilet, going to go out and buy a new fish to bring into the mix? Well the mobster-fish then bilk that fish out of its money at cards, by skill, cheating, or violence? What use is money in a society made up of three people (or three sapient fish) and no manufactured goods? Lots to think about, please email me your essays on the topic!

Curtis, 7/17/19

Nice try, Greg! The term “millennial” is slippery, but almost every definition sets the cutoff birth years in the mid-to-late 90s, which means the very youngest millennials are more than 20 years old at this point! Your son is “Gen Z” or whatever they’re going to end up calling themselves. You know who may well be a millennial is you, Greg, as the top of that cohort is in its late 30s at this point. “LOL,” as you kids say! (As a Gen-Xer, I personally can’t wait for the Generational Wars to end with Generation [Unpronounceable Glyph] refusing to interact with us in any way until it comes time for them to harvest the precious moisture in our bodies.)

Funky Winkerbean, 7/17/19

I don’t think I’d noticed before that Young Cliff Anger looks uncannily like handsome movie actor Mason Jarre. You’d think with a mug like that he wouldn’t have to be a writer to make it in Hollywood! Oh, wait, right, the Communism meant he couldn’t show his pretty face in polite company. Well, at least he has a simian pal to keep him company! Maybe Funky Winkerbean is just going to pivot to being a wacky strip about a happy-go-lucky Stalinist and his drunken chimp roommate, and I cannot emphasize enough how much of an improvement that would be.

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Curtis, 5/16/19

Thanks to the operation of comic book time, as the years go by I relate more and more to Greg Wilkins as a peer, and for people Greg and my age, “the turn of the century” will always mean the late 1800s or early 1900s. But guess what! Curtis, who’s in his middle school years, was, as of today, born sometime in the later part of the first decade of the 21st century, so for him “the turn of the century” probably means, like, the 1990s. And he’s still not interested in it! Because it was before he was born, and is dead history to him! There are millions of real kids out there with this wholly normal attitude, just in case you personally wanted to dwell on that and feel the icy cold of death settling in your bones.

Gasoline Alley, 5/16/19

But if you want to feel young, on the other hand, just check in with Gasoline Alley, which isn’t afraid to repeatedly interject 1950s character actor Frank Nelson into its trademark “the characters tell jokes that are incomprehensible both to the audience and to the other characters” antics.

Hi and Lois, 5/16/19

Oh snap

Motherfuckin ouch for moths

Moths are cancelled, everybody

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Curtis, 4/11/19

Far be it for me to criticize another man’s curmudgeoning, but I think that Greg has the escalating affronts to his sensibilities in the wrong order here. The elder Wilkins is generally depicted as being obsessed with how much Better Things Used To Be, in the Past, despite the fact that he’s a middle-of-the-cohort Gen Xer, at oldest, but anyway, what is a podcast if not the modern-day equivalent of an old-timey radio show? Shouldn’t Greg be pleased that this ancient art is being recognized and turned into movie franchises, just like the old radio serials of old? His reaction seems way, way over the top: as he begs his Creator to take him away from this fallen world in the final panel, he appears to have taken the admonishment in Matthew 18:9 to heart, plucking out his own eyes so that he can’t see the abomination that is a Sir Patrick Stewart-voiced poop emoji. But you can still hear the podcasts, Greg. You can still hear the podcasts.

Shoe, 4/11/19

I can’t decide if this strip is an indication that the Shoe creative team has suddenly remembered that their characters are all birds, or have forgotten so profoundly that they made this joke entirely on accident.

Judge Parker, 4/11/19

Two days later, Marie was murdered by the mafia. Sam and Abbey never noticed that she failed to visit over the holidays, because [rolls dice] Neddy [rolls dice again] was sad because she lacked direction, and that took up all their energy.