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Panel from Slylock Fox, 11/26/23

CASSANDRA [bursting through the studio door]: Quick, Kopy, I need a favor. Put this portrait up on your easel and act like you’re painting me. I’ve already made sure that I’m wearing the same clothes as in the picture; let me get myself in position so I get the strut exactly right.

KOPY: Gee, Cassandra, this painting is completely dry, and I don’t even have any blue paint out. Slylock’s gonna see right through this scheme! You’d better just run if you don’t want to get caught.

CASSANDRA [posing sexily, just they way she knows Slylock likes it]: Who said anything about not getting caught?

Dick Tracy, 11/26/23

OK, yes, ha ha, Sam’s colleagues on the Major Crimes Unit are razzing him by implying he’s going to extract saliva from their suspect X. Libris by smooching her, and Liz is even demonstrating the frenching technique he’ll used to acquire an adequate sample size, but we need to talk about the metaphor Sam is deploying in response in the final panel. I guess we’re supposed to visualize him … face down in the gutter? Sort of swimming along? But he’s wearing a snorkel, so he can get a real good look at what’s going on down there? And these floating brains keep blocking his access to air? It’s all very unsettling, and once they solve this series of gruesome stab murders, probably everyone on the squad should sue everyone else for creating a hostile work environment.

Gasoline Alley, 11/26/23

Hey, did you know that back in the early ’80s, Bolero was considered a top “sex record”, a cliched thing you’d put on the old hi-fi if you brought a special person back to your pad and were ready to get down? Not saying that’s what’s going on here, but I do invite you to imagine going home with someone and instead of hopping into bed they insisted you wait for a bizarre cat food commercial featuring singing mice, to “set the mood.”

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Pluggers, 11/17/23

Look, I’ve said a lot of pretty mean things about Pluggers over the years, so let me say something nice: this is a very cute drawing a cat-man opening his mouth wide to eat a cinnamon bun. It’s cute and I enjoy it! Let’s put the implied bodily self-loathing aside for the moment and just enjoy this cartoon. Ha ha, he’s taking a big bite!

Family Circus, 11/17/23

If you squint, you can see that the front page of the Family Times, the fake newspaper these little twerps have been working on all week, has the banner headline “HANG UP YOUR CLOTHES OR NO DESERT!” I guess I shouldn’t be shocked that the Keane Kids have decided to, on their own initiative, print a propaganda rag dedicated to their own repression, but it still fills me with a profound sense of disgust.

Gasoline Alley 11/17/23

The civic leaders of Charlotte, North Carolina, heard that Rufus and Joel were approaching and quickly built a Potemkin skyline to divert the irritating rustics as far from the good citizenry as possible.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/13/23

You know, at first I thought this was about the eternal struggle between the modern scientific method, as represented by Doc Pritchart and his flatlander medical degree, and the ancient, chthonic folk wisdom of the Holler, as represented by Granny Creeps and her cave full of potions. But then I realized that Doc is probably just trying to stop Snuffy from getting poisoned. He’s right to worry! Who the hell knows what’s in that stuff she’s going to give him!

Pluggers, 11/13/23

Look, Pluggers, I get that you’re a comic whose whole thing is that you take submissions from your readers who are, by definition, pluggers, and pluggers absolutely love to forward emails consisting of jokes that they themselves did not write to their friends and loved ones, but I feel like maybe you should Google those submitted jokes to make sure they aren’t from, say, Cool Funny Quotes Dot Com’s collection of quotes by Anonymous or a weirdly padded blog post on Grumpy Fuckers Dot Com written by “Royston Butterscotch” or a magnet you can buy from Fem Power Gifts by Getbullish or X, the website formerly known as Twitter before you go to the trouble of illustrating them with anthropomorphic chickens.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/13/23

It doesn’t count as “dramatic tension” per se, but for weeks now I’ve been really unable to tell whether or not Mud is supposed to be sincere about the Mirakle Method or not. I guess he believes both that the Method can improve your life and that people are rational economic actors who always have access to the full information they need to make spending decisions that will never regret. Buzzy, though? Buzzy seems shady. Feel like Buzzy’s gonna get forcibly Mirakl’d in the not so distant future, i.e., he’ll be weeping openly as he contemplates his own personal swingset on the moon.

Gasoline Alley, 11/13/23

I often have fun on this blog trying to figure out where exactly various syndicated newspaper strips take place. But, Gasoline Alley? Never really cared to put the energy into it, to be honest with you all. Good thing, too, because all I had to do is wait it out for a while until today, when the strip tells us the characters all live near Charlotte, North Carolina. Who would’ve guessed? Not me, I admit, but as noted I wouldn’t have tried very hard.