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The Lockhorns, 5/19/22

I’m pretty sure the first legacy comic to do a cryptocurrency joke was, shockingly, Snuffy Smith way back in 2015, although they just did a “bitcoin? what if a coin got bit? Wouldn’t that be funny????” joke. Nobody would ever accuse The Lockhorns of being innovative, but I respect that they wait until something like cryptocurrency has become a fairly well established part of our mental landscape before figuring out exactly how to fit it into its own internal universe. What they came up with is “Leroy has lost much of his paltry savings in the recent crypto crash but still keeps posting ‘HODL’ on Reddit and won’t shut up about crypto at parties,” which is 100% correct and I applaud it.

Blondie, 5/19/22

I was about to make an “Alexander, your father looks literally exactly like you, as if you were not sired by him in the normal human way but rather were grown in a vat from cells containing only his DNA, what possible reason do you have for saying he’s taking away from the quality of your social media,” but upon reflection I think the joke is about him smiling. Is … smiling bad now? Do the kids not smile anymore? Does Blondie, the strip that did a “You know what I miss? Chalkboards” gag two days ago, know more than me about acceptable facial expressions on Instagram? Truly this is one in a series of humbling moments.

Gil Thorp, 5/19/22

Climate change is accelerating, and you can find evidence of it everywhere. For instance, as the traditional saying goes, “Gil starts actually coaching in June, corn be heavy soon.” But it’s only mid-May and he’s already noticed one of his players is blind! Truly we are moving into uncharted territory.

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Pluggers, 5/11/22

The historian Ronald Syme wrote that the Emperor Augustus, who died at 77, “outlast[ed] the friends, the enemies, and even the memory of his early days,” and I think about that a lot as I get older, about the way that, if you’re lucky enough to live to a ripe old age, you become something of an alien, as the world you grew up in recedes further and further in the past. And what do you get by way of compensation? Well, there’s more life, I suppose, which is not to be sneezed at. And old age maybe takes the edge off a bit by softening our vision and our minds, so we come to perceive the world through a comforting and gradually thickening haze. Unfortunately, modern society and so-called “advanced” medicine has allowed us to reverse this process, so that we can see, with abrupt clarity, the ruin that we have become. As usual, Pluggers, a strip I have been forced to respect more and more, has given me much to think about today.

Gil Thorp, 5/11/22

Speaking of seeing, Nolan Ryan could see, so I don’t know what to tell you, kid. God bless Scooter for sticking up for his tragically blind friend, but as a guy who was once a loser tween who blurted out some ill-thought-out defenses of his fellow losers, I can guarantee you that he will only feel more embarrassed in the coming innings, as Valley Tech sends Greggg flailing aimlessly at bunt after bunt after bunt that he can only hear.

Dustin, 5/11/22

“Can you imagine? It’s 2022! How would we even cash it?”

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Beetle Bailey, 5/7/22

I have never denied being an effete urban liberal and so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that I know very little about how guns “work.” That said, I did see, in the theater, the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Eraser (dubbed “the OK-est film of 1996” in a review in the Omaha World-Herald that is sadly behind a paywall), so I’m aware that carrying a rifle in each hand with an intent to shoot both at once is simultaneously possible and extremely cool looking. Yes, Sarge’s guns are not anywhere near as bad-ass as Arnold’s, but also Beetle and Killer are significantly less dangerous foes than even the henchmen in a typical Schwarzenegger movie, and definitely my first thought in seeing this is that Sarge had decided that an accidental encounter in the dark, where faces can’t be seen but the perimeter of the facility must be protected at all costs, might be the solution to a lot of his long-running problems.

Gil Thorp, 5/7/22

You read it here first: they’re gonna drag this thing out so that we think Mr. Hamm is on the run from the mob or something, when in fact he’s the subject of a humiliating viral video from like 2009, where he tripped in public and said something real dorky like “Oh, for love of Pete!” His personal hell is that every new microgeneration of teens discovers his pratfall anew every few years on the latest social media platform: the college-age millennials of the early ’10s on Facebook, the dirtbags of Snapchat, the doomscrollers of Twitter, the furries of Tumblr — each, at the height of their power, coming together to relentless cyberbully him. Currently it’s spreading like wild on TikTok, as teens worldwide try to imitate the tremulous tone he uses with “Pete!” while deliberately falling face-first onto the sidewalk as their friends hoot and holler behind the camera. If any of these people find out where he lives, he’ll be toast.