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Mary Worth, 2/2/18

I suppose “Saul Lewman” is here because Mary Worth doesn’t want to run afoul of the notoriously litigious Newman’s Own foundation, but think about the implications here: Mary and Toby live in a universe where Paul Newman was never born, and where his counterpart had the somewhat more recognizably Jewish name “Saul Lewman,” but still became a famous leading man. Does that mean that Mary lives in a world that was, in the mid 20th century, less anti-Semitic? Did the Holocaust never happen in the Maryverse???? This is a can of worms that can’t be unopened!

Spider-Man, 2/2/18

Having never really read Spider-Man comics books as a kid, and having refused to see the James Garfield Amazing Spider-Man movies because of the absence of J. Jonah Jameson, I’m not really familiar with The Lizard, a super-villain who hasn’t made much of a pop-culture impact. Is his deal that he’s a real asshole who’s mean to everyone? That’s what I’m getting from his appearance here. Not that I’m complaining, mind you!

Dennis the Menace, 2/2/18

Mrs. Wilson covers her mouth in astonishment, as she suddenly makes the connection between George’s odd sleeping hours and the reports of a portly and stealthy masked vigilante who has been rumored to fight crime on the city streets in the wee hours of the morning.

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Crock, 1/28/18

This is another great example of how the top two “throwaway panels,” which don’t appear in all layouts and thus need to be somewhat disposable, can really add another dimension to a strip. Without them, today’s Crock is a goofy tale of how that diabolical Crock has decided to take care of the fort’s trash problem by airdropping the whole midden onto the hapless Lost Patrol in lieu of supplies. However, the vulture’s dialogue in the second panel of the top row reveals the awful truth about this so-called “trash and garbage”: it’s a mountain of corpses — French and insurgent, dead of combat or disease, all mingled together — and the Lost Patrol is about to an experience a nightmare beyond imagining.

Dennis the Menace, 1/28/18

The only person you’re menacing with that attitude is yourself, Dennis, since without a social medial presence you won’t be able to establish a personal brand! What are you thinking? (In other news, I’ve already risked my browser history to ascertain that PlayPal.com isn’t a fetish dating site, you’re welcome.)

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/28/18

“And it’ll be great to for Johnny to have grandparents, since we killed all of our parents for the insurance money years ago. Wait, did I say that part out loud?”

Six Chix, 1/28/18

Soooo, what you’re saying is that the cormorant is carrying a bag full of … flesh? Stretched out flesh already marked, ready to be grafted onto women as they sleep by the cormorant’s sharp, nimble beak

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Dennis the Menace, 1/7/18

One of the anecdotes my wife and I repeat to each other endlessly comes from years ago, when we were driving through Pennsylvania and stopped, as was our habit, at Clyde Peeling’s Reptile Land, where we never paid to actually see the animals but took advantage of the Subway, bathrooms, and gift shop anyway. On this trip there was this very sullen-looking little boy, maybe seven or eight years old, wandering through the store, and then his mother came up to him, and said to him, with a voice that was trembling and almost fearful, “Look, it’s a book about dinosaurs! You love dinosaurs!” He squinted at her, and then, with a voice loaded with contempt, said, “I don’t read,” and then walked away, leaving her standing there with the book.

This is, of course, a horror story about our society’s coming decline into idiocracy, but I’d like to imagine that maybe there was some comeuppance in store for the kid, like the one Dennis is experiencing here. Maybe there’ll be a horrified realization, once it’s too late, that a generation that refuses to read will be followed by a generation that couldn’t read even if it wanted to.

Hi and Lois, 1/7/18

Here’s another story for you about illiteracy that I love, although I’m not personally involved in this one because most of it took place decades or millennia ago. Once upon a time, there were a bunch of clay tablets dug up in Greece with an alphabet on them nobody could read. Archaeologists called the script Linear B (because it was clearly related to Linear A, another alphabet nobody could read), and various dating techniques pegged those tablets as being from between 1400 and 1250 BC. The first written material in Greek doesn’t appear until the 770s BC, and the Greeks themselves had legends of other people who lived in Greece before them, so the assumption was that Linear B was those people’s vanished language. And what’s more romantic than a vanished language? Think of all the mysterious culture locked in those tablets — the poetry, the histories, the odes to forgotten gods — tantalizingly right in front of us, and yet indecipherable.

In the 1950s, though, some British classicists figured out that Linear B (though not Linear A, which is still undeciphered) was in fact Greek after all, an earlier form of the Greek language written using a clumsily adapted syllabary system that was unrelated to the Greek alphabet that emerged centuries later. And what, after this breakthrough, did those tablets turn out to be telling us? There were no poems or tales of dead heroes at all. The tablets consisted entirely of administrative records for the palaces where they were found, keeping track of how much grain, wool, sheep, and wine had been extracted from the peasantry and handed over to the army and the temples. Some royal accountants had apparently got wind from some other culture of the idea that you could record words by making marks in clay and realized that would make their jobs loads easier, but they hadn’t bothered to sell anyone else on the concept. Or maybe they tried but nobody — not the priests, not the poets, not the kings — saw the point in it.

And in the middle of the 1200s, this whole early Greek civilization went up in flames — literally, all the palaces were burned down in a relatively short timeframe. The fires hardened the clay tablets stored in the palace basements, which is why we have so many of them; after the culture collapsed, nobody wrote anything in Linear B anymore, because there were no more kings to take stuff from the peasants and give it to the soldiers and priests.

To us, a societal loss of literacy is a terrifying thought. But to those ancient Greek farmers, none of whom had been able to read in the first place, it must have been liberating. Maybe Chip and his girlfriend are seeing the possible anarchic paradise that Joey has to look forward to. Everywhere they go, writing is the means by which an omnipresent state imposes its will on everyday behavior. But Joey? Joey can do whatever he wants. He doesn’t know any better, and that’s the purest freedom of all.