Post Content

Beetle Bailey, 5/19/23

It is of course a long-established joke in Beetle Bailey that Sarge is a cartoonish glutton, but every once in a while they also do a joke that he’s a cartoonish drunk. I feel like these are different things! I’m not here to either defend or disparage Sgt. Orville Snorkel, his appetites are between him and his God and his chain of command, I just feel like we’re expected to think of the boozing and the eating as part of the same thing, and I feel like they are in fact different things.

Gasoline Alley, 5/19/23

The current Gasoline Alley storyline is about how Rufus has a real bad head injury, and, maybe this is just me, but I think it should be more obvious when one of your characters has a real bad head injury. Like, they should be acting a lot more differently than they usually do than Rufus is here. Just my take.

Shoe, 5/19/23

As you can imagine, I’ve given some thought about the most succinct way I could describe each and every one of the comics I read and review for this site, and I think my current take on Shoe is “All the birds are very depressed.”

Post Content

Gasoline Alley, 4/30/23

I thought perhaps we were going to get the beginning of a heartwarming arc where Joel learns to read late in life (hey, it worked for Crankshaft!) until Rufus actually reads the letter to him, which is so inane as to make someone actively avoid becoming literate if that’s all that’s on offer. Why not spend your day planting trees rather than reading books and letters written on the stuff they make the trees into, you know? It’s Arbor Day all year, my friends.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/30/23

Another data point for the “Where is Hootin’ Holler” question: probably the only part of the U.S. that has both a rich history of hillbilly culture and a fault line capable of producing earthquakes this powerful is the New Madrid Seismic Zone, which puts today’s action squarely in the Ozarks. Apologies to the millions of people from St. Louis to Memphis who don’t live in a region of mandatory seismic retrofits who are about to wake up under a pile of rubble!

Panel from Slylock Fox, 4/30/23

Ha ha, check out the facial expression on that doctor. That is a guy who’s trying to come up with a schedule for the nurses and his least favorite intern to keep 24/7 tabs on Cassandra’s litter box.

Post Content

Mary Worth, 4/12/23

Of the several minimum wage office temp jobs I held between semesters when I was in grad school, probably the best was the summer I spent in a vault under the Wells Fargo HQ in downtown San Francisco, helping alphabetize a huge collection of wills that had been entrusted to various regional banks that Wells Fargo had absorbed over the previous decade. This job was the “best” in the sense that we were let into the vault in the morning and ushered out at night and otherwise received no supervision, had no real set goals or other sense of how fast we were supposed to be going, could play music as loud as we wanted and take two-hour lunches, could answer the phone down there by saying “Hello, you’ve reached … The Vault” as if we were working at the city’s hottest nightclub, etc. Now, if you were someone who had in fact gvien your last will and testament to the San Luis Obispo Savings and Loan for safekeeping, my job activities that summer might’ve given you some pause, as we were definitely not trained in any kind of archival preservation techniques and even our alphabetizing was a little haphazard; but most of the wills we were dealing with had been filed decades earlier and had probably been superseded by newer ones, while the old forgotten wills had simply been passed from bank to bank, long after the customers’ deaths, until they ended up in our lap, because some cover-your-ass decision by the legal department mandated that Wells Fargo had to do the bare minimum to make any specific will in the pile findable in a pinch.

Anyway, I remember two things about the wills, which we temps absolutely would open up at random and read to one another: they often contained a lot of juicy family drama, especially concerning what were euphemistically referred to as the “natural children” of the person writing the will, and some of the names were very funny. Unfortunately, because this was 25 years ago and my brain has mostly puddingified in the interim, the only name from the list that I can remember specifically is “Stella Patella,” but you have to admit that’s a pretty good one! This has been a very long and roundabout way to say that I loved today’s Mary Worth because it taught me that one fun aspect of working at a vet is that you get to learn all the wild things people name their pets, which probably range from the very good to the very bad. It doesn’t make up for all the depressing euthanasia business, but I bet it’s pretty neat.

Gasoline Alley, 4/12/23

Ha ha, as easily predicted, these dumb children have immediately started blabbing to a resident of 1863 about how in the future ladies can be cops and other potentially timestream-wrecking business. “STOP HER,” hisses Ida Knoe, the evil time-travelling doll, “SHE’S LIABLE TO LET IT SLIP THAT WE ARE FROM THE FUTURE!” How many children has Ida Knoe brought backwards in time and then had to murder in order to keep the universe intact? Probably a lot! Too bad her programming (?) doesn’t allow her to learn from her mistakes.

Dennis the Menace, 4/12/23

Kudos, I guess, for Dennis the Menace having a gag where Dennis unleashes the sort of sick burn an actual six year old might use. Unfortunately, like many things an actual six year old would say, it isn’t particularly menacing, or particularly funny.

Blondie, 4/12/23

I find it interesting that we’re not seeing the full carpool in panel three. It’s only when Dagwood is finally alone with his most intimate friend that he can truly confess the sort of sick shit that plays in a loop in his brain 24/7.