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Dustin, 3/15/20

Incredibly, it seems that there must be a limit the amount of cross-generational abuse Dustin can absorb from his father, because apparently the hateful old man feels the need to leave the house to dump it onto others as well. Thanks for accommodating this gentleman as you’re wrapping up for the day, Starbucks employees! Probably you’ve walked through the steps of taking an order repeatedly over the past several hours, putting you pretty much on automatic pilot about what you’re doing. So here, let your last customer of the evening really theatrically make you feel like an asshole about it! Bet you wish you had locked that door exactly at closing time now, huh?

Mark Trail, 3/15/20

Mark Trail is many things — an adventurer, a sort-of dad, a murderer — but above all, he is a man of science. Some might claim that the pika is the cutest animal out there, but he won’t believe it until he sees a rigorous, peer-reviewed study proving it.

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Dustin, 2/29/20

I’ve beat this drum before, but it continues to boggle my mind that Dustin, a strip deliberately dreamed up to poke fun at the foibles of millennials, constantly goes to the well of jokes about its millennial characters’ dating life without ever even mentioning Tinder or other dating apps and instead having them go cruise for love at the local fern bar as if they were characters in Shoe. But I also feel it’s important to note that, once you get past this oddity, you get to the actual theme of these strips, which is that Dustin and Fitch, two of the recurring characters whose life the strip offers up to us to experience, are completely unfuckable, just an utterly dogshit pair of dudes who women reject literally on first sight.

Arctic Circle, 2/29/20

The whole deal with Arctic Circle is that its characters all live in the Arctic, and while I’m not sure what the tone of the strip has been over the full 12 years of its run, I can tell you that today it’s about a group of characters living in an Arctic biome completely collapsing due to climate change. This is of course always pretty grim, but today’s strip, in which it appears that a mountain of beaver corpses has been piled up in a futile attempt to hold back the tide of rising sea levels, is really something else.

Mark Trail, 2/29/20

“Normally we don’t let Rusty interact with other children because his face would frighten them, but these kids have seen all kinds of savage beasts in the forest! They’re tough! Maybe if we keep his mask strapped on tight, he can join them!”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/29/20

HELL YEAH SNUFFY

NO GODS NO MASTERS

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Crock, 1/22/20

One of the dangers of doing a syndicated comic strip for years is that you either subconsciously repeat a joke or just submit a strip you drew years ago hoping your editors won’t notice; and one of the dangers of writing a blog making fun of comic strips for (gulp) 15-plus years is that I’ll see one of these repeats and make more or less the same joke about it that I did long before. Sometimes I miss it, but sometimes as I’m about to hit “publish” a little voice nags at me that it all seems too familiar. So it was today, when I had a joke about how the characters in Crock aren’t in North Africa at all, but rather are parasites who reside on the flesh of some unimaginably huge creature; but then I got that aforementioned nagging feeling, and went walking through my archives, and sure enough, back in 2007, when the creator of the strip was still alive, I made basically this joke about an an entirely different strip that made basically this joke. Anyway! More proof that the Crock characters are all inhabitants of some awful living planet made of meat, or something! This is Crockiverse canon, and you have to think about it every time you read the strip!

Shoe, 1/22/20

Shoe, meanwhile, is relatively “with it” for a long-running legacy strip today: The Wiz is, after all, an expert in all things computers, and it would be unrealistic for him to try to convince Shoe that there’s any viable revenue model for online journalism.

Dustin, 1/22/20

You know, if you’re going to do a strip about a middle-aged character picking up some youth slang, it might behoove you to be really, really sure you know what said youth slang means, since “ghosting” refers not to dropping a text conversation with outstanding matters still unresolved, which is what from context the Dustin clan seems to be talking about here, but rather ending a romantic relationship with someone by wholly and abruptly cutting off communication with them. Granted, what with how the rest of them treat Dustin, it’d be fully believable that he’d finally get fed up and ghost them in the correct sense of the word!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/22/20

“Can’t people just die of old age anymore without having to make a big production out if it? I mean, come on.”