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Shoe, 1/21/24

This is a truly terrible joke and I don’t want to deal with it on any of it’s “humorous” levels but I think we should pause to think about the “college roommate” angle. The Perfesser is an extremely despress fifty(?)-something extremely bird-man who can’t maintain a romantic relationship and is doing the bare legal minimum to serve as a guardian for Skyler, the son of a presumably deceased sibling. This joke seems to require a close personal relationship to work and the only one that his creators can come up with for him is with a college roommate, someone he presumably hasn’t spent time with in decades. It’s extremely grim stuff, just like every other time we get the tiniest peek at the personal lives of any of the bird-people in this strip.

Gasoline Alley, 1/21/24

Hey guys, remember the Magic Eye books, from the ’90s? They were everywhere for a little bit and I was always bitter about it because I’m nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other and have terrible stereo vision as a result, so they never worked for me and I came to resent their popularity since it felt like they were mocking me personally. Anyway, that fad ended and I haven’t had to think about them for decades but now, uh, here’s today’s Gasoline Alley, I guess. Is this even going to work as a Magic Eye thing? Just a bunch of heads in a row? Anyone whose eyes work properly, please give it a shot and report back, though I won’t think less of you if you don’t, since I would not attempt to see these withered freaks in 3D even if I were physically capable of it.

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Gasoline Alley, 1/20/24

Longtime faithful readers know that in most of the strips I comment on here, there’s at least one character upon whom I wish every ill. In Gasoline Alley that’s obviously Slim, but I can at least take comfort in the knowledge that the strip’s creators also love to torment him. Why else would his plan to murder teenagers with a meteorite go awry and his house get haunted by inane ghosts? Anyway, you may remember the time he got an erotic concussion, and now we’re back to another unsettling tale of his place in our collective sexual dreamscape. His wife found a mysterious love note in his pocket that he doesn’t remember getting; could it be that Saint Agnes, who famously was to be married against her will and then punished for her Christianity by being sent to a brothel but God protected her by making her hair grow over her body and striking her would-be rapists dead, is telling Slim that his own chastity is in danger? Will his ordeal finally be ended with a knife to the throat, with eager believers soaking up his blood with handkerchiefs in memory of his martyrdom? I have frankly never wished for anything more in regards to this strip.

Pluggers, 1/20/24

Because I’m a hip young person with the cutting edge job of “blogger,” my calendar is on my computer and backed up to the cloud, but somehow I had never really thought to use the calendar’s search function before, and the other day while looking for something I discovered to my surprise — and, frankly, delight — that everything I’ve ever put in there, going back to 2003, has been retained! I can see all my quotidian appointments for the last two decades! Only today, in seeing this panel, did I realize that I have become truly one of the most unsettling beings of all: the cyber-plugger.

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Gasoline Alley, 12/22/23

OK, I may have to revise my previous statement of approval for Gasoline Alley’s wild, no-rules approach to the mall Santa game. Folks, the men (and occasional women) who put on the red suit and the fake beard are just doing their jobs, part of which involves the emotional labor of making everyone feel welcome and seen; do not take their openness towards you as an invitation to live out your longstanding sexual fantasy of making it with a thousand-year-old elf/nature spirit.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/22/23

If you need more proof that Parson Tuttle is a theologically unlearned fraud, consider the fact that anyone who decided that a lone cow was a perfectly acceptable substitute for a nativity scene probably hasn’t read Exodus 32.

Dennis the Menace, 12/22/23

You know I’m on a big kick lately about how the Lockhorns are millennials, but the truth is that today millennials are between 27 and 42, so probably most adult legacy comics characters, especially those with younger kids, are millennials. Anyway, Alice mostly ignoring her son’s Christmas-related whining by idly scrolling on her phone is a particularly millennial way to turn the menacing tables on him, in my opinion.

Mary Worth, 12/22/23

Sorry to obsess about Brad’s hat, but I’m clearly not the only one! Would he be less insufferable if he dropped the hat and let his hair free like God intended? Maybe! He could at least try it!