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Shoe, 8/24/25

You of course all know that one of my favorite things to grapple with in every Shoe strip that’s even vaguely bird-related is “Did the Shoe creative team remember that all their characters are birds when they wrote this joke?” Many of the regular bird characters have bird-related names — P. Martin Shoemaker, Cosmo Fishhawk, Loon, Roz Specklehen, Muffy Hollandaise … uh, well, not her, but you get the point — so for this one, I’m concluding that all these celebrities are not the ones we know and love but are their aviamorphic counterparts in the Shoeniverse. “Steven Seagull” was the tipoff. Anyway, no idea what The Birds was about in this reality, but I’m assuming it portrayed birds in a much more positive light than Hitchcock did in his frankly offensive anti-bird polemic.

Luann, 8/24/25

Years ago, the whole point of Tiffany within the larger narrative of Luann was that she was a hot, vapid, scheming cheerleader who bullied and belittled our heroine, Luann, and who got made fun of in turn behind her back. After a while they decided that maybe it was kind of grim to have one of the strip’s main characters be that kind of caricature, so they gave her depth and positive qualities and such, and then I sort of checked out of reading Luann for like a decade, but now I’m back and … I guess we have a new one of those? And she’s Tiffany’s college roommate? Interesting that this is a comic strip ecological niche that simply must be filled. More on this story, such as whether I bother to learn this person’s name, as it develops.

Hi and Lois, 8/24/25

Honestly I think the thing that actually works here is that instead of just texting each other, they’ve snuck off from their respective homes to the secluded woods where they can presumably fool around; the handwritten letter is I’m sure nice but probably isn’t the most important factor. Anyway, Chip, maybe don’t talk about your mom too much right now.

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The Lockhorns, 8/23/25

Look, I don’t know how they can make it any more obvious that the Lockhorns are millennials. Today’s panel deploys one of the most joyless ways to hammer the point home, just having Loretta doing a marginally cool catchphrase from 2010 or whatever. Is she going to talk about heckin’ doggos next? Will Leroy extol the epicness of bacon? They’re not even antagonizing each other today. Remember when this strip was about how much they disliked each other? We need to recapture that spirit, and if that means shifting the Lockhorns further down the timestream to the unmoored nihilism of Gen Z, I say do it.

Hi and Lois, 8/23/25

Thirsty, no! Liquor before beer, never fear … beer before liquor, never sicker! I guess he’s already sick, though. (His sickness is the serious disease of alcoholism.)

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Gil Thorp, 8/19/25

When Gil says he’s “trying not to take it personally” that his ex wife is now “play[ing] for the other side,” you probably think he’s referring to the fact that his wife left him for her female golf coach, but that’s old news: in fact, she’s going to be coaching for the other side, by which I mean she’s taken the job of athletic director at hated Milford rival Valley Tech. Anyway, more important question: what’s happening on top of Kaz’s head? Is that a man bun, or some kind of fascinator attached to his hairband? The strip colorist seems to be refusing to grapple with this and is trying very hard to make whatever it is blend into the background.

Andy Capp, 8/19/25

This is definitely a curious sequence of events, as in the first panel Andy is walking along a very broad canalside path, so spacious that the canal isn’t even visible in the frame, and yet in the very next panel, one word’s worth of lyrics later, he has tumbled into the drink. My theory: despite the fact that we see Andy in that first panel, we are actually meant to understand that we’re seeing things from Andy’s drunken perspective, in which he has infinite space to meander back and forth as he likes. Sadly, in panel two, hard physical reality intervenes.

Hi and Lois, 8/19/25

Wow, I guess Trixie died? Or is no longer a baby? Or Hi and Lois have realized that Sunbeam really is her best friend, and is perfectly capable of looking after her, so they no longer need to take such a hands-on parenting approach? Any of those developments honestly would merit further exploration, though I guess it’s also interesting that Irma thinks she’s finally going to catch Thirsty jerking off on camera but actually she’s just going to see him crying quietly to himself.