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Hi and Lois, 12/21/24

Hmm, Ditto, interesting: canonically, in the Bible, Joseph doesn’t have any lines (in the sense that no direct speech is attributed to him), while the shepherds actually do, at Luke 2:15. So you’re not making a ton of sense here, unless … your play’s script is heretical??? Are they teaching heresy in our schools and/or churches (not actually clear where this is taking place) now? I think it really says a lot about society and such. Giving Joseph lines. Hmph. The very idea!

Gil Thorp, 12/21/24

Now, normally, “Guy falls off the wagon and immediately gets into an altercation with the cops while the locally beloved idiot teen who says ‘yeet’ all the time looks on and sadly says ‘yeet’” would be the point at which said guy has truly hit rock bottom. But this is Marty Moon we’re talking about. He let loose a string of on-air profanities at a teenager in a pirate outfit! He lost a bunch of money making “friendly” golf bets with a guy who looks like Ben Franklin! He’s got a long way to fall, is what I’m saying.

Gasoline Alley, 12/21/24

Oh, man, I don’t think I realized that Ida Knoe the evil talking doll left Arty the AI to die in his crashed spaceship on the surface of Mars! Unlike the children, Arty doesn’t need oxygen to live, but his batteries will eventually run out, so he’ll have days or maybe even weeks alone to contemplate his own failures and how they led to his inevitable doom. Not sure if Ida Knoe left him there because she was jealous of him or because her magical powers of teleportation won’t work on something without a soul.

Mary Worth, 12/21/24

RED ALERT, REPEAT, RED ALERT

BOWLING HUNK CHRISTMAS WEEK STORYLINE IN MARY WORTH

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

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Beetle Bailey, 12/17/24

A thing that fascinates me is that deep in the DNA of the daily comics is the idea that their artists conceive of them as a black-and-white strip where the blacks and whites represent a platonic natural-color “reality” one conceptual layer down, even though probably the majority of their readers see them in a form where someone (not the original artist) has added color to the strip in ways that don’t or can’t reflect that “reality”. I realize that was an extremely complicated sentence, but a simple way to illustrate it is that Beetle Bailey’s Miss Buxley, in “reality,” wears a red dress to work, as depicted in the Sunday strips where the artists do the coloring themselves, but in the black-and-white dailies this solid color is represented by black, even in strips that subsequently have color added for online display.

Anyway, I bring all that because Zero’s red hat is clearly a bit of whimsy added by the colorist rather than something intended by the original artist, though comics are a collaborate process and I enjoy what everyone brings to the table. According to an article on the Smart Hospitality Supplies website (and who am I to argue with the severely underpaid content drone or, possibly, large language model-based AI that wrote this), a red chef’s hat “can signify passion, power, and determination. It might hint at a chef who is fearless in their culinary experiments, pushes boundaries and isn’t afraid to spice things up. This could translate into bold flavour combinations, innovative techniques, or a drive to keep service running smoothly and effectively in the kitchen.” Is writing a phone number in whipped cream an “innovative technique”? We’ll allow it. We’re also told a blue chef’s hat “can represent tranquillity, depth, and wisdom,” so clearly some thought was put into adhering to Zero’s character here.

Gil Thorp, 12/17/24

Speaking of passion and determination, Coach Perm Gerads, fresh off defeating the Mudlarks, is now aiming to defeat Marty Moon’s sobriety. Gil’s bartendress girlfriend (?) is hesitant about enabling all this, but maybe she shouldn’t have come to work today wearing a shirt that says “DO IT” (???) in big letters.

Family Circus, 12/17/24

You’re on the right track, Billy, but I’m guessing Grandma doesn’t want to see St. Nicholas of Myra in his bastardized Coca-Cola pitchman form delivering a cheery “Hi!” to adherents to orthodoxy and heresy alike. Surely there was a card you could’ve gotten her depicting the fiery 4th century cleric slapping the heretic Arius in the face for preaching that Jesus was a created being rather and not coequal to and coeternal with God the Father? That would be the sort of thing to get her going.

Mary Worth, 12/17/24

Hey, remember Dawn’s friend Cathy, who seemed pretty convinced that it was Dawn’s fault that her drip boyfriend Jared dumped her, because she was a wanton whore who liked to go to the club (with Cathy) while Jared was having an emotional affair with one of his physically abused patients? Well, she seems pretty intrigued by the idea that Jared might have forgiven Dawn enough to invite her to have a Christmas threeway, which scientists are already calling “the saddest sexual act in the history of the human species.”

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Six Chix, 12/12/24

OK, I get the impulse to turn a bitten-out semicircle on this pastry-shrink into his mouth, but the execution is very uncanny. Like I don’t buy that it opens or closes like a regular mouth, it just seems like it’d be open forever, an endless scream, a wound bleeding purple. Not really the most reassuring thing you’d want to see during therapy, in my opinion! Anyway, I’d like to imagine that the genesis of this strip was the writer being told by a therapist “You are loveless but not unloveable!” and instead of applying this insight towards solving her various emotional problems she decided to draw a cartoon about talking Uncurstables® sandwiches instead.

Gil Thorp, 12/12/24

“The catch is made by … Milford?” really makes it sound like Marty Moon has never heard of an “interception” before. “Goshen threw it … but Milford caught it? Is that legal?” [desperately paging through the rulebook]

Shoe, 12/12/24

We all know, of course, that women be shopping. But what if I told you … that in the year 2024 … they be shopping … on the computer.