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Slylock Fox, 4/1/22

In the Book of Genesis, there is a moment, immediately after Adam and Eve eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, when their minds shift before their habits: they’re still naked, as they had happily been before, but now they have a moral code that deems that nudity shameful, so they immediately have to lurch into action and create makeshift clothes for themselves. So too did the animals of Slylock Fox move haltingly from their previous, brutish existence into the post-animalpocalypse world we know. In today’s strip, these birds know that the old ways, in which the momma would simply vomit those worms down her child’s throat, are no longer acceptable, but they have yet to realize that their ability to manipulate tools like pails and silverware means that they can simply abandon that nest and forcibly evict the hapless humans from the comfortable house below.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/1/22

Ha ha, the “tin ceiling!” You know, because the video game was located in Montoni’s. And in Montoni’s the ceiling is … made of tin? Oh, you don’t know that? You’ve read Funky Winkerbean daily for years and you would never in your life make that connection? Well, screw you, man, today’s strip is for the real fans, who definitely exist.

Gil Thorp, 4/1/22

Say what you will about Gil Thorp, but the strip always manages to come up with new odd combinations of characters and traits for their storylines. Did any of us have “kid obsessed with baseball trivia with a dad who ghostwrites terrible CEO ‘leadership’ tomes that get sold at airport book stores” on their bingo cards? No, but I for one appreciate that we got here.

Mary Worth, 4/1/22

Speaking of unique new storylines and/or the lack thereof: hey, Toby, remember when your husband had a vague flirtation with a student that boosted his ego but didn’t go anywhere, and when he was given the opportunity he declined to dispute your description of it as an “emotional affair”? Well, I don’t know about your job, but marriage-wise, that’s what we call a “get out of jail free card.”

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Gil Thorp, 3/29/22

Ahhh, if it’s spring, it must be time for … the Gil Thorp baseball plot, which will definitely involve these young men and their varying degrees of enthusiasm for baseball trivia! I’m not a “sports guy” but the answer to this question has to be pitching-related, right, since they used to put pitchers in 60 games a year or whatever but now they’ve evolved into delicate, crane-like creatures capable of throwing at superhuman speeds but also they need lots of downtime between starts or their hollow bones will explode? Anyway, mostly what I’m thinking about here is how insulting it must be to be relegated to “and friends…” status behind “Scooter Borden” and “Gregg Hamm”. That’s too many Gs and too many Ms, Gregg!

The Lockhorns, 3/29/22

Someone being present during their spouse’s physical is a little unusual but not unheard of. But I like the way Loretta has her purse slung over her shoulder here. Like she could take off at any minute if this gets boring. C’mon, doc, you gotta keep teeing up the sick burns if you want her to stick around!

Pluggers, 3/29/22

Haha, I love the “lots and lots and LOTS of pluggers” credit for this one. “WE GET IT,” the Chief Plugger is saying, “YOU PEOPLE NEED MASSIVE, COSTLY, AND ONGOING PHARMACEUTICAL INTERVENTIONS IN ORDER TO LIVE”

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Six Chix, 3/23/22

One of those things that I never thought about until I learned it and then I thought about it all the time is that nowhere in the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme is it stated that he’s an egg, yet this is, universally, how we envision him. The main theory explaining this is that the rhyme was originally conceived of as a riddle: “humpty dumpty” was a general slang term of abuse for the short and squat, and so the joke was something like “Sure, seems weird that some little fat dude fell off the wall and broke into pieces … but what if we told you that actually, he was an egg? Eh?” Humor, notoriously, does not translate well across eras, and this is a pretty good example of that in play! You know what does play well across eras, though? Body horror! That’s why I’m wholeheartedly endorsing the Six Chix reboot of the Humpty Dumpty mythos, in which the Humpty Dumpty was deliberately taunted into hurling himself to a horrifying death so that his “inner bird” could be set free. Each bird in this grim world must convince other beings to die in order to perpetuate their species. It’s grim stuff!

Crankshaft, 3/23/22

If you “run” Montoni’s pizza through “the pipeline” (of your digestive tract), you’ll experience any number of unpleasant side effects, at both ends and the middle, which might in some sense be interpreted as “saluting”. Sorry you had to visualize that, but the motto of this blog long ago shifted from “I read the comics so you don’t have to” to “I involuntarily contemplated Ed Crankshaft’s pizza-farts so now you’re going to have to as well.”

Gil Thorp, 3/23/22

I know, in theory, that the teens in the first two panels have just finished a practice, and it’s only in the second panel that we’ve zoomed in enough to see that Parnit is sweating as one normally does after such exertion. But what it looks like is that Pranit has been told that he’ll be allowed back in the lineup after being suspended for his little “I accidentally became a bookie and hired an enforcer” oopsie and has immediately broken into a frenzied, manic sweat of excitement. He might have a problem not messing up between now and the game! Looks like he’s gonna mess up right there, to be honest!

Judge Parker and The Phantom, 3/23/22

Sorry I have not been keeping you up to date on Judge Parker and The Phantom, but I did want to point out that they’re both drawn by Mike Manley but written by two different people, and I would like to imagine that Manley enjoyed getting the scripts this week and finding out that he would get to do two explosions on the same day.