Post Content

Pardon My Planet, 6/17/23

Look, I am not a vegetarian (anyone who’s met me IRL will have a good chortle at me having to preface anything with this), but if you’re doing a comic set up where a guy dies and appears in the afterlife festooned with beef-eating paraphernalia only to discover that the gates to paradise are guarded by one of the very creatures he so loved to eat, you’d better follow through with it. This guy has just arrived in his personal hell, is how this strip would go if a coward hadn’t written it, whereas a divine bovine letting bygones be bygones is a truly limp “punchline.” On the other hand, I guess the implication may be that the guy died in agony in some sort of grilling accident, which I may be willing to accept.

Daddy Daze, 6/17/23

The thing about Marvin is that it just fills me with contempt and disgust, whereas Daddy Daze is still novel and weird enough to me that it instead inspires a kind of existential dread and honest fear. What was the first thing that was like changing diapers that we miss because we enter in media res? What was it? It will haunt my dreams tonight.

Gil Thorp, 6/17/23

Despite losing some key players to the juvenile justice system, the boys’ baseball team has finally figured out the secret to playdown success: just ignoring Gil’s attempts at coaching altogether, and to actively tell him to knock it off if he gets insistent with it.

Post Content

Mary Worth, 6/14/23

Look, I know I have to tread delicately here, because organized dog fighting is very real and very awful. But since this is Mary Worth and we know that any threatened horrific violence is never going to actually happen, I feel like we can enjoy ourselves and admit to ourselves that Mary making direct eye contact with the reader, with an expression that’s worried (but also maybe a little excited?) and announcing “it’s a highly secretive blood sport that can occur anywhere!” is very funny.

Gil Thorp, 6/14/23

Ah, the vapecrime plot has been resolved by, uh, sending all the vape teens to juvenile prison? I’m sure they’ll be fine and come out of the experience better people. Meanwhile, in more important news, the girls’ team has made the playdowns and [squints at last panel] THE PLAYOFFS WHAT THE HELL ALL THESE WOKE CHANGES TO THIS STRIP HAVE GONE TOO FAR THIS TIME

Post Content

Pearls Before Swine, 6/10/23

I’m taking a slight break from my usual routine here to relay a personal anecdote. On Saturday, I went to a showing of The Philadelphia Story at one of the big historic movie palaces in downtown LA, and one of my personal crosses to bear is my inability to be chill about the fact that grown-ass adults cannot stay off their fucking phones even at special events like this. The guy sitting in front of me had one of those absolutely enormous phones that bordered on tablet size, and all through the pre-show stuff where the lights were down and they had a film historian giving a presentation about the movie, this guy had his phone on and sitting in his lap and the browser was open to the Pearls Before Swine strip you see above. Mostly he was paying attention to the presentation but every once in a while he would look down at the strip and zoom in on the phone so he could read it better. This went on for like 10 minutes; he did not look at any other strips, just this specific one. He turned the phone off before the actual movie started, but if I had had to tell some dude to NOT LOOK AT A NEWSPAPER COMIC DURING A MOVIE, surely I would have become the Comics Curmudgeon in that role’s final form. Anyway, if the person who was doing this is reading these words right now, sorry to drag you in public like this, but: when the lights go down, the phone should go off.

Beetle Bailey, 6/12/23

“I’m also burdened by feelings I can’t quite articulate about how my hair-trigger rage is damaging my relationships with other people and my own conception of myself as a basically good person.”

Gil Thorp, 6/12/23

The kids who got busted by Marty Moon for selling vape sticks were all boys, so I’m not sure why Gil feels like he has to alert the girls’ team’s coaches about it in the middle of a game. I guess he figures if his afternoon just got ruined, so should everyone else’s.

Slylock Fox, 6/12/23

Today’s Slylock Fox is a good example of why using a rigorous program of logic to suss out the truth is simply not enough for any law enforcement operation. Sure, Slylock can smugly point out that only a mammal would need hair care products, but the criminal reptile’s refusal to surrender in the face of this “gotcha” means that Sly is resorting to the hotel’s front desk workers to actually apply the force necessary to catch the thief, which implies that he’s failed to grasp the true nature of the problem he faces.