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Archive: Herb and Jamaal

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Please put extensive, detailed descriptions of who these people are in the comments

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Dick Tracy, 6/11/14

Well, Dick Tracy is going to fully commit to this crossover with the defunct Little Orphan Annie, with added hint-references to, I guess, Alley Oop? Maybe? It’s a series of nesting nods to comics history that maybe a few dozen people are going to fully appreciate, and you know, you keep doing you, Dick Tracy creative team. I’m more interested in the idea that Annie has been kidnapped by/is hanging out with “The Butcher of the Balkans,” whoever that may be. According to Wikipedia, there are at least five people who have been graced with that nickname (and, side note, sucks to be your region if it merits that kind of Wikipedia disambiguation page); two of them are in jail for war crimes and three are dead, one of whom was subjected to some extreme measures to make sure he stayed that way. Is there another one waiting in the wings? What relationship does he have with the Warbucks family? Will uncomfortable questions come up about who made bucks selling weapons to both sides in the wars that killed tens of thousands when Yugoslavia broke up in the ’90s? Is someone going to have to write a lot more checks?

Gasoline Alley, 6/11/14

I wonder if we’re being asked to believe that (a) “awk” is a thing the Kids Today say when they mean “awkward” (do they? maybe! I try to avoid contact with the Kids Today whenever possible) and (b) that children who who have been depicted casually throwing around the word “fellers” would talk like the Kids Today? Either way, I’m much more unsettled by the parrot, who seems fully sapient and increasingly outraged that nobody seems to notice or care. “No! Not the blanket again … I can’t stand any more darkness! Why won’t you listen to me? Why can’t anyone understand what I say?”

Herb and Jamaal, 6/11/14

Looks like Rev. Croom is in some financial difficulty and is dodging his creditors! Fortunately, he’s found some biblical backing for his strategies.

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Look at that tail sticking straight up, right in a family newspaper, disgusting

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Herb and Jamaal, 5/21/14

Or you could blame the way that, over the last 75 years or so and without anyone exactly intending it to happen, a set of institutions that had for centuries existed mainly as intellectual finishing schools and networking opportunities for the elite were transformed into producers of the credentials necessary for just about anyone to enter the modern economy, despite the lack of a fundamental transformation of how they work, with any number of unintended negative consequences (out-of-control student debt being at the top of the list). But, sure, use this as an opportunity to work out your frustrations about your dad, whatever.

Apartment 3-G, 5/21/14

It looks like one of Jack’s ex-thralls has wandered back onto the compound to make fun of his current victim! I also really hope Carol is kidding, though; they’ve been talking for at least five minutes, so clearly she should’ve figured out by now that Tommie’s incapable of feeling “love” or indeed any other emotion stronger than mild distress.

Slylock Fox, 5/21/14

5) Do whales engage in forbidden, perverted encounters with fish, despite the fact that cetaceans and fish are from completely different taxonomic classes with radically different reproductive cycles, and their superficial physical similarities are entirely the result of convergent evolution? Absolutely true!

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The Wehrmacht’s 6th Army misses the playdowns once again

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Gil Thorp, 5/3/14

Gil Thorp’s baseball-season storyline continues to be super boring, to the extent that today’s panel three got me thinking about how great it would be to see the Gil Thorp creative team take a few weeks off from high school sports action to give us a recap of the Battle of Stalingrad. It’d be all big flappy hands and confusing jumps back and forth to different indistinguishable soldiers in the various battle zones and occasional appearances by Field Marshal Erich von Manstein dispensing vague platitudes while wearing a shit-eating smirk. It would definitely be more interesting than whatever’s going on with Lucky Haskins’s academic problems, I tell you what.

Apartment 3-G, 5/3/14

Tommie has been under Jack’s Svengali-like sway for three whole weeks, which is plenty of time to get her into a routine, work her to exhaustion, and separate her from all desire to go back to her previous life. But he hasn’t stopped his scheming there, and frankly I approve of his plan to ply the formerly bearish Professor with carbs and cheese, as his new character design is far too emaciated for my taste.

Herb and Jamaal, 5/3/14

Yes, why would you solve a math problem with some dumb old “equation” when you could just use common sense instead? That … that would be a super power, honestly.