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Intelligent Life, 11/8/24

I can’t believe I’m saying this about Intelligent Life, a comic strip that’s usually about unpleasant bug-eyed people saying fandom words at each other, but today’s strip is actually based on fairly complex semiotic play. Rather than simply having a conversation, Skippy, and, uh, the other guy are talking about the sort of conversation they expect to have, while simultaneously undermining those expectations. Skippy’s reply being put in quote marks, indicating we’re at least one layer of metanarrative deep here, is a particularly effective device.

Hagar the Horrible, 11/8/24

Speaking of narrative, if they had put an eggheaded intellectual like me in charge of today’s Hagar the Horrible, it would’ve been about how the canonically illiterate Hagar believes that his people’s lore should be preserved via their ancient oral tradition of poetry, and is horrified to see Hamlet reading it out of some book. But you could also do a joke about how he’s afraid of spiders, I guess. I mean, why not, if you want to. I don’t like spiders either, for the record.

Mary Worth, 11/8/24

Incredible visual storytelling here: in panel two, we discover that this whole time Wilbur was standing just in front of these ladies, ready to start manically ranting about how great Mary and her food are, certainly better than the sad Lean Cuisine meals he microwaves every night and baptizes with his tears — but only the sudden pullback of our viewpoint reveals his face, in a real jump scare.

Dennis the Menace, 11/8/24

Wait, doesn’t the “world’s best dad” formulation imply that there aren’t any more like him? Does … does Dennis not know that other people have dads, or what?

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Mary Worth, 10/14/24

“You’re right, Mary! I made a decision meant to avoid pain of the type I had suffered before, but now, under your careful guidance, I’ve learned that was a mistake. I’m ready to marry yet another emotionally unavailable workaholic! I’m ready to be a widow twice over! Thank you, Mary, for breaking my spirit!”

Intelligent Life, 10/14/24

Sure, this comic strip conflates the zoot suit, popularized by African- and Mexican-Americans in the 1940s, with a suit cut in a totally different style that was worn by the Joker as portrayed by Cesar Romero, a man of Spanish and Cuban descent, which isn’t great. On the other hand, it got me to do a little Googling and discover that for a mere $950 you could be the owner of a genuine “Jokers Wild Purple” zoot suit, so who’s to say if it’s good or bad?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/14/24

I kind of love Silas’s emotion affect in the second panel here: he’s both pleased and a little puzzled. Have Snuffy and his fellow primitive denizens of Hootin’ Holler finally developed the ability to understand and even sympathize with the emotions of others? Silas had never thought he’d see the day, but his store is the lone outpost of globally-scaled free-market capitalism in this otherwise backwards region, and he’s ready to profit off this local development with the sale of some of the sympathy cards he ordered a while back, just in case.

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Blondie, 6/5/24

The number one thing that makes me feel like an old person is my stiff right knee and hip, but number two, coming pretty close behind, is the fact that so many things, ranging from thoughtful essays to instruction manuals, that 10 years ago would’ve been written out as text now only exist in the form of YouTube videos. I don’t want to watch a video! I read very quickly and find videos that mostly consist of someone just talking to be annoying! Often I am in public and do not want to annoy everyone around me! Sometimes they’re good for real how-to instructional stuff but more often than not a written essay with some pictures would be just as good if not better and also would be easier to search through quickly to find the relevant bits. Anyway, my point is that I read today’s Blondie and immediately thought, “Finally, Blondie accurately depicts what young people are like for once — they all think you should learn everything from YouTube and it fucking sucks,” but then I instantly recoiled in horror. Is this what I’ve become? Someone who cheers when Blondie sticks it to the kids these days? My feeling of deep shame almost, but not quite, wiped all thoughts of how much I hate most internet video from my mind.

Intelligent Life, 6/5/24

I guess I haven’t talked about what Intelligent Life’s whole deal is in the few times I’ve posted it here, so: it’s whole deal is that it’s about a number of unpleasant people who are obsessed with “nerd” franchises (i.e., most of modern film and TV entertainment) in the most boring way possible. Anyway, today’s strip pissed me off because, yes, Meta’s use of user content for its dumb AI offerings is bad, and Emperor Palpatine is bad, but Emperor Palpatine never did anything like the real stuff Meta is doing that they’re talking about here. I saw those movies. He mostly did evil space wizard stuff and evil space politics stuff. He barely ever even used computers! Can we please be serious here.

Family Circus, 6/5/24

Without telling his wife, Big Daddy Keane has been taking Billy to one of those barbershops that hasn’t “gone woke” and starting obeying Big Government’s oppressive laws against trepanation, in an attempt reduce the internal pressure responsible for his eldest son’s grotesquely shaped head. The treatments are unpleasant, but they’re starting to show results!