Post Content

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.

Post Content

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.

Post Content

Blondie, 11/15/22

I love this comic, which is quite clearly the product of a person who has never encountered protests or union organizing (here collapsed into a generic “picket”) outside seeing them briefly on cable news framed in a vaguely negative way, and has no idea why they happen or how they work. Yes, definitely people are recruited into the abstract idea of a picket, and only when they turn down the opportunity to participate as if they were a teen in an afterschool special who just said no to drugs are they wooed with information on what the picket is actually about. That explains the “A ‘Nappy’ Makes Me ‘Happy”’ lady, who apparently thought she was going to a protest for equal rights for diaper fetishists.

Hi and Lois, 11/15/12

It was a particularly rough day at the office — so rough that Mr. Foofram had to use the time-reversing technology from Christopher Nolan’s film Tenet to extract a few extra hours of work from Hi, meaning he’s coming home older than he should be. Lois has told him that he needs to complain to the Department of Labor about this, as Foofram isn’t paying him overtime, but he won’t stand up for himself!