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The Lockhorns, 4/14/22

Really loving Loretta’s expression here. Instead of starting a sentence to sound like a compliment but twisting it into a cruel taunt by the end, as is his wont, Leroy has instead simply started a sentence to sound like a compliment only to use it as a springboard for some dumb bit of wordplay he thought up during dinnertime’s customary icy silence, and frankly, she can’t figure out how to feel about that. With the cruel taunt, at least she knows he’s thinking about her.

Marvin, 4/14/22

The phrase “social distancing” rocketed to the top of the public’s mind roughly two years ago in the opening stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I don’t know what possibility is sadder: that it took the Marvin creative team that much time to come up with the extremely terrible “smell distancing” variation (it doesn’t even have the same number of syllables, Jesus Christ) or that they came up with it right away but only now have decided that it’s no longer “too soon.”

Judge Parker, 4/14/22

Hey, remember the “April hides out with her family” plotline in Judge Parker that was so boring that I barely ever mentioned it on this blog, which exists entirely to crack wise about the boring antics in the world comic strips? Well, apparently within the Parkerverse it’s was so exciting that it’ll merit building a whole season of streaming TV around it.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/14/22

You know what is exciting, for the moment? The current Rex Morgan, M.D., plot! Ha ha, goading a street tough into saying “What’re you going to do — hit me with that broom?” and then immediately hitting him with that broom is a very funny bit and I approve. Mind you, it doesn’t look like our hero’s hitting him particularly hard, but in his defense he is nursing a shoulder injury.

Shoe, 4/14/22

OH MY GOD THERE ARE BIRD JEWS EVERYBODY

JEWS

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Six Chix, 3/23/22

One of those things that I never thought about until I learned it and then I thought about it all the time is that nowhere in the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme is it stated that he’s an egg, yet this is, universally, how we envision him. The main theory explaining this is that the rhyme was originally conceived of as a riddle: “humpty dumpty” was a general slang term of abuse for the short and squat, and so the joke was something like “Sure, seems weird that some little fat dude fell off the wall and broke into pieces … but what if we told you that actually, he was an egg? Eh?” Humor, notoriously, does not translate well across eras, and this is a pretty good example of that in play! You know what does play well across eras, though? Body horror! That’s why I’m wholeheartedly endorsing the Six Chix reboot of the Humpty Dumpty mythos, in which the Humpty Dumpty was deliberately taunted into hurling himself to a horrifying death so that his “inner bird” could be set free. Each bird in this grim world must convince other beings to die in order to perpetuate their species. It’s grim stuff!

Crankshaft, 3/23/22

If you “run” Montoni’s pizza through “the pipeline” (of your digestive tract), you’ll experience any number of unpleasant side effects, at both ends and the middle, which might in some sense be interpreted as “saluting”. Sorry you had to visualize that, but the motto of this blog long ago shifted from “I read the comics so you don’t have to” to “I involuntarily contemplated Ed Crankshaft’s pizza-farts so now you’re going to have to as well.”

Gil Thorp, 3/23/22

I know, in theory, that the teens in the first two panels have just finished a practice, and it’s only in the second panel that we’ve zoomed in enough to see that Parnit is sweating as one normally does after such exertion. But what it looks like is that Pranit has been told that he’ll be allowed back in the lineup after being suspended for his little “I accidentally became a bookie and hired an enforcer” oopsie and has immediately broken into a frenzied, manic sweat of excitement. He might have a problem not messing up between now and the game! Looks like he’s gonna mess up right there, to be honest!

Judge Parker and The Phantom, 3/23/22

Sorry I have not been keeping you up to date on Judge Parker and The Phantom, but I did want to point out that they’re both drawn by Mike Manley but written by two different people, and I would like to imagine that Manley enjoyed getting the scripts this week and finding out that he would get to do two explosions on the same day.

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Judge Parker, 11/20/21

So, see, the mayor has been launching a vendetta against Abbey, falsely accusing her of burning down her own B&B in both the court of public opinion and also the actual court system. But his deputy mayor has evidence (which the mayor doesn’t know about) that Abbey actually burned down her own B&B, and he’s going to blackmail Sam over it. Got it? Make sense to you? Me neither, but I’m willing to just move along to the “Sam physically assaults and yells at people” stage of proceedings.

Mary Worth, 11/20/21

Hey, remember how Mary was Libby’s original owner, but she had to pawn her off on Estelle because it turned out Dr. Jeff was allergic to cats? I feel like the fact that Estelle is a person who’s acquired a collection of other people’s unwanted pets is a pretty good fit that with the fact that she’s on the verge of becoming a person who, on multiple occasions, has taken Wilbur back as a romantic partner after he’s made an ass of himself in public. The only thing that can save her from this fate now is Mary smugly informing her that only one pet per apartment is allowed under Charterstone rules, leading to her being evicted and blessedly forced to leave town.

Hi and Lois, 11/20/21

Hey, Hi, you ever consider not being a huge fucking downer all the time? Just a thought!