Post Content

Blondie, 2/10/14

The Winter Olympics, in addition to being a stage where the greatest athletes compete at the highest level to achieve glory, is also a carefully managed corporate product with armies of lawyers. They are not to be joked about, OK? You can’t just publish in hundreds of newspapers a dumb joke about how the kids today like texting and wouldn’t it be funny if someone at the Olympics were texting while competing in their chosen event? No, that would be unthinkable. You can only have someone make that joke, then immediately acknowledge that it was just a joke, ha ha, obviously the Olympics has no such event, that would be degrading to the sport, please, tune in for primetime coverage on NBC!

Apartment 3-G, 2/10/14

Tommie’s fiancé has stopped by her apartment in New York on the way to the airport … from … England? Which makes no sense? Anyway, he’s missed his plane now, because they’re “drowsy from happiness,” which I’m assuming is some sort of code for sex that you’re allowed to use in the comics because it’s completely opaque. But now he’s missed his plane! And his head is bobbing suggestively! And he’s going to figure out that his fiancée is a crazy person who is keeping a baby deer in her New York City apartment! Everything about this whole scenario just screams “surrealistic dream narrative” to me, starting with “somebody agreed to marry Tommie.”

Herb and Jamaal, 2/10/14

Ho ho, these fellas are lost but they won’t stop and ask for directions? Men, amiright? In unrelated news, Herb has a malignant melanoma.

Post Content

Crock, 1/24/14

Ha ha, the joke is that they’re using “database” as a double-entendre to refer to a sexy part of a lady’s body! This is the sort of joke that would be funny to someone wholly unfamiliar with computers and only passingly familiar with sex. What’s really of interest to me here, though, are the weird black squares floating around our sassy legionnaire’s head in panel two? What are these mysterious, featureless intrusions into ordinary reality? My guess is that computer expert Billie Jean has long ago subsumed all of human existence into a vast computer simulation that she can watch and control like a god. Those blocks are a brief glitch in the Matrix. Her erstwhile paramour and his comrade, their bio-existence snuffed out uncountable digital eons ago, now endlessly replay this scene for Billie Jean’s amusement.

Herb and Jamaal, 1/24/14

“Ha ha ha, just kidding, I’m exaggerating because of how much time I spend on my cell phone! But seriously, I need something to help me take the edge off a little, if you know what I mean. Drugs. I’m talking about drugs. SELL ME DRUGS, HERB”

Mary Worth, 1/24/14

“Also, I had sex with Broadway legend Ken Kensington seven times! Well, one of those times we just did oral. It was a little too exciting, if you know what I mean. That’s why I came back to you and Santa Royale!”

Funky Winkerbean, 1/24/14

THE FUNKY WINKERBEAN MISSON STATEMENT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

Post Content

Mark Trail, 1/21/14

WHOA, you guys, Mark is actually taking Rusty fishing, again. Do you think he might actually … like him, or something? Not if today’s strip is any indication! Remember, kids, Mark Trail knows all sorts of useful nature facts, which is why you should follow his lead and just feed pelicans by hand when they fly into your boat, even though they’re aggressive hypercarnivores with huge, powerful wings. Clearly the only reason Mark is doing this is because he’s hoping the pelican will mistake Rusty for a tasty fish and eat him, or because an hour on a boat with his misshapen ward has sapped him of his will to live and he figures an agonizing death in a pelican’s gullet is preferable to this.

But our pelican friend subbornly refuses to kill, so Mark just decides to violate all the rules of space and time by casually grabbing onto the pelican’s ankle desite the fact that the pelican is clearly like six or seven feet away from him. “Jessica Canupp, pelican point … hmm, interesting! I hear they’re doing top-secret experiments on faster-than-light travel there! Come on, Rusty, let’s follow this pelican through the wormhole that brought him here, since the laws of physics are clearly collapsing in this region and our very molecules will collapse into subatomic goo if whe stay much longer!”

Herb and Jamaal, 1/21/13

Honestly, if you told me that this strip was going to start focusing less on playful banter down at the Heart and Soul restaurant and more on Herb’s forbidden erotic fantasies, the kind he can’t tell anybody about, I’d have been cautiously open to it. But if this is the sort of thing that’s in store for us, then no thanks.