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It’s the 2023 Comics Curmudgeon Summer Fundraiser!

Mother Goose and Grimm, 8/10/23

The Marvin crossover we never hoped we’d see.

Gil Thorp, 8/10/23

Meanwhile it’s Relationship Week over at Gil Thorp, establishing or recapping its myriad cross‑cultural, ‑gender, ‑institutional, and other conflicts in advance of the fall season. Here, Sluggin’ Girls’ Softball right fielder Inma Rimsha and disgraced Valley Tech import hurler Kwan Tak “The Korean Nightmare” share a tender moment. Protip, Inma: if you want to win Kwan’s heart, bring a sack of Haitai Honey Butter Chips along to your next picnic. Although signs suggest his heart is as far as you’re gonna get.

Daddy Daze, 8/10/23

Gah, is there a more relentlessly wretched comics character than Paul Daze’s Goth Pal Chuck Chuck? Yes! Imagine his children, cruller-stuffed and sugar-high, rolling around their dank rooms writing abuse memoirs and plotting his murder.

Pearls Before Swine, 8/10/23

Chuck Chuck has one thing right, though: the donuts always find a way in.

Make a generous contribution to the Comics Curmudgeon today—donut hesitate!

—Uncle Lumpy

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Pardon My Planet, 6/17/23

Look, I am not a vegetarian (anyone who’s met me IRL will have a good chortle at me having to preface anything with this), but if you’re doing a comic set up where a guy dies and appears in the afterlife festooned with beef-eating paraphernalia only to discover that the gates to paradise are guarded by one of the very creatures he so loved to eat, you’d better follow through with it. This guy has just arrived in his personal hell, is how this strip would go if a coward hadn’t written it, whereas a divine bovine letting bygones be bygones is a truly limp “punchline.” On the other hand, I guess the implication may be that the guy died in agony in some sort of grilling accident, which I may be willing to accept.

Daddy Daze, 6/17/23

The thing about Marvin is that it just fills me with contempt and disgust, whereas Daddy Daze is still novel and weird enough to me that it instead inspires a kind of existential dread and honest fear. What was the first thing that was like changing diapers that we miss because we enter in media res? What was it? It will haunt my dreams tonight.

Gil Thorp, 6/17/23

Despite losing some key players to the juvenile justice system, the boys’ baseball team has finally figured out the secret to playdown success: just ignoring Gil’s attempts at coaching altogether, and to actively tell him to knock it off if he gets insistent with it.

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Mary Worth, 5/16/23

Look, I’m a guy who likes to eat out, and LA has an great food scene with amazing high- and low-end restaurants, but definitely at the places I go to regularly, I have one or maybe two go-to dishes, because … I dunno, they’re good! I already know they’re good! Why would I get the thing that may not be good, when there’s something I already like? Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that you either die a hero or live long enough to find Mary Worth relatable. Also, are they stretching out the “Mary and Jeff go on a date” transition between storylines into a second week? Whatever, who cares, this is representation for me, as established.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/16/23

Do I want to keep making jokes about the obvious desperate poverty that the residents of Hootin’ Holler suffer in? I’m ambivalent about it, but when they keep doing strips about things like people stealing badly needed useful tools from their own children just for a few dollars, it’s pretty hard not to.

Daddy Daze, 5/16/23

OK, we’ve all just sort of accepted that the bit of Daddy Daze is that the Daddy Daze daddy pretends that the Daddy Daze baby can talk, but I think we should draw the line at the Daddy Daze daddy pretending that the Daddy Daze baby can write.