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Dustin, 12/15/22

I always criticize the comic strip Dustin for its failure to depict its young-person characters in realistic ways, so I have to give credit where credit is due: TikTok is, in fact, an app that young people enjoy, and where you could watch many hours of dance videos, if you so choose. Now, young people do not come away from an evening of TikTok dance video viewing looking like they’ve just watched a solid six hours of disembowelments, like Dustin does here, nor do they make these kinds of execrable puns, but, you know, baby steps.

Judge Parker, 12/15/22

“Uh, no, Steve, my version is at least kind of plausible, whereas yours doesn’t really make sense at all. How much blood have you lost, exactly?”

Family Circus, 12/15/22

“So put some damn pants on. Fun time’s over!”

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Shoe, 12/9/22

I suppose it’s possible that immediately before the action we see here in the strip, Loon was pridefully boasting of his achievements or good qualities to this bird-priest and earned this stern rebuke. But his posture (slouched, staring off into the middle distance, seemingly unaware that the bird-priest is even there) makes me doubt that. From context, it seems like this clergybird is just quoting (misquoting, actually) judgemental bible verses at random. If this is the state of bird Christianity, it’s no wonder that bird Judaism is flourishing.

Judge Parker, 12/9/22

This dude in the vest is some former Sam Driver client whose name I can’t be bothered to remember or look up and who now serves as his guide through the seedy Cavelton criminal underworld. He says it’s too dangerous for him to tell Sam the details he needs, but fortunately for Sam and us he simply cannot let an exposition-prompt such as “like they went after Judge Duncan” pass him by. Sure he could’ve just said “Yep!” while smiling tightly, but who could resist the chance to dish out “Oh, you mean Judge Meth-Head, the judge who loves to buy meth?” gossip to someone who clearly hasn’t heard it yet.

Gil Thorp, 12/9/2

“Look at that! Oh, right, you can’t, because nobody drew it. Well, take our word for it, it was pretty cool.”

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Judge Parker, 12/8/22

When I was a teen, there was a syndicated War of the Worlds show that was a sequel to the 1950s movie version, but set in the present-day (i.e., the late ’80s) when the aliens from the movie — who were not dead after all, just in suspended animation and kept in secret labs around the world — started waking up and making a comeback. I pretty instantly fell in love with this show, and so was somewhat discomfited when the second season started and abruptly the time period was shifted to a dystopian, riot-scarred “near future” where society had begun to unravel, and several beloved (by me) characters were killed off almost right away and new boring ones introduced. This was before obsessive online fandom was a thing, so there was no real way for 14-year-old me to know that a new showrunner had been brought in to change things up, but shoutout to the War of the Worlds (1988 TV series) superfan who put all the drama on the Wikipedia article.

My point is that Cavelton, the Connecticut-ish Judge Parker setting, has always been pretty bucolic and suburban, but suddenly we’re expected to believe that since 2018 it’s been in the grips of “the C18,” a deadly drug gang. Well, I’m not 14 anymore and I’m not going to just accept this. I’m calling it now: these C18 guys are just as boring as everyone else in this drippy town, as evidenced by the fact that their attempt to come up with a cool name like “MS-13” produced extremely dopey results.

Crankshaft, 12/8/22

You’re talking to a janitor from the future about how the book you’re about to write will create a utopia. Meanwhile, or maybe ten years ago, who can say, I’m passed out drunk in a Santa costume in the middle of the day. We are not the same.