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Curtis, 12/13/22

Part of the whole comedic engine that makes Curtis work is that Greg Wilkins is kind of a square. Still, I hadn’t guessed just how much he eschewed the modern world’s loose morals — and how much he secretly yearned to emulate them — until today. “Dare I?” he thinks. “Dare I take off not just my shoes, but my socks — and not in the shower or under the covers at night, but in out in the open in the living room, where anyone who lives here can see my bare feet? I mean, why not? If I have to look at naked toes every day thanks to the out-of-control liberal media, plus all those foot fetish websites I keep accidentally ending up on when I do innocent Google searches like ‘is it legal to go barefoot’ and ‘punishment for barefoot in public’ and ‘big toed nymphos can’t stop foot-fucking,’ then who am I to cling to the old ways?”

Hi and Lois, 12/13/22

As you should know by now, my favorite kind of Hi and Lois strip is the kind where we see just how dark the Thurstons’ lives are, and today’s really pays off in that department, with Thirsty sitting in his patched chair in front of his computer where he’s watching the game on some janky illegal stream from Slovenia that’s downloading malware right now, maybe because he failed to pay his cable bill, maybe because he’s in a fight with Irma and they’ve divided the house in half with masking tape, I Love Lucy-style, and she’s claimed the living room. Either way, I assume that “My football team is having a losing season” is code for “I’ve lost a ton of money betting on the NFL this year,” and his depressed slouch tells me he was in for a lot on Portugal over Morocco too.

Mary Worth, 12/13/22

I know we’ve all been trying to figure out what exactly Zak’s deal is over the course of this storyline, but I really do think we need to apply Occam’s Razor and accept the simplest answer, which is that Zak is just kind of dumb.

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 12/11/22

There’s a lot going on in this panel — Max trying and failing to pump iron; how peevish the alligator gym attendent is about this crime; “Biceppe’s”; the fact that Harry Ape is wearing a fedora to the gym — and I love all of it. I also love the solution to the mystery, which plays on our idea that ape feet are really pretty hand-like, so it makes sense that they’d leave prints, but also lets us know that human toeprints could be used as evidence as well, so you’d better not be out there committing crimes barefoot. Anyway, it’s really too bad for Harry that when the ascendent animals took over the wreckage of our civilization, they couldn’t figure out our advanced “gloves, but for feet” technology.

Mary Worth, 12/11/22

I honestly cannot get over the fact that Iris is more or less ignoring the weird hot babysitter sexual roleplay vibe Zak and Nan have been putting out for this entire encounter and only seems to care about how much she and Nan look alike. (And I guess that Nan can’t remember her name, which is genuinely annoying.) Anyway, she seems not to be hung up on the age gap thing at the moment, so it’s good that she didn’t verbalize the Doublement commercial joke, because they haven’t aired those since the mid ’80s and Zak definitely would not get it.

Hi and Lois, 12/11/12

Every once in a while Hi and Lois decides its mission is to paint an uncompromising portrait of middle-class suburban life. Like today, for instance, when the joke is that a man has cheaped out on a Christmas tree, then tried and failed to lie to his wife about it.

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Dick Tracy, 11/17/22

Look, I know, we’re never getting back to the glory days of “guy in gimp suit gets eaten alive by rats,” but you have to admit that we’re coming pretty close with a Dick Tracy villain named “Steelface,” whose whole thing is that he has a steel plate in his face that’s magnetic, and you’d think that he’d be know about situations where such an arrangment would be dangerous, like, say, getting into an MRI machine, and also you’d think the medical techs would ask questions like, “Say, you don’t have a steel plate under that bandage, do you?”, but it turns out nope on both counts and now he’s going to get his skull ripped apart by the MRI machine’s powerful magnets. He only ended up at this hospital because he hit his head fleeing from a police raid on his stolen car operation, so we can basically credit this grisly death to the cops, or at least that’s what they’ll be telling themselves while they stand around watching the poor hospital night shift guy scraping what’s left of Steelface’s face off the inside of the MRI machine with a putty knife.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/17/22

If you were really at a concert like this and a performer made this kind of announcement, everyone in the audience would chuckle knowingly and understand that “ice cream” and “tummyache” were code for “drugs and/or alcohol” and “unconscious.” Sadly, this is Rex Morgan, M.D., where literally everything is exactly as it seems on the surface, all the time.

Hi and Lois, 11/17/22

Sure, Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC has somehow managed to survive and even thrive in a declining newspaper industry as their readership ages, but I’m hoping that this comic means they’re about to go all-in on crypto at the worst possible time.

Crankshaft, 11/17/22

Look, not every Crankshaft has to be a big “event,” you know? Sometimes it can be something quiet and delightful, like Crankshaft falling face-first up a flight of stairs.