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Marvin, 3/17/23

Most people would tell you that Marvin’s main innovation is that it’s a newspaper comic strip that’s mostly about peeing and pooping, but let’s not forget that it’s also about a whole family — three generations of people, plus pets — who simply do not like one another and would abandon one another for a better offer at the drop of a hat.

The Lockhorns, 3/17/23

I think we can all agree that Leroy is a fairly unpleasant person generally, and so I’ve always assumed that his coworkers spend as little time interacting with him as possible, which probably goes a long way towards explaining his perennial lack of professional success. This is probably the most attention any of them have ever paid to him, which no doubt makes the whole experience sting all the more.

Blondie, 3/17/23

I like that this guy just takes it as a given that, even in his own internal mindscape, Dagwood would not be smart or resourceful enough to escape from a leprechaun on his own initiative.

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Dennis the Menace, 2/15/23

I know the intended reading here is that Dennis is asking Mr. Wilson, who doesn’t like kids now, whether he (Mr. Wilson) liked kids when he was himself a kid. But they bolded one instead of were at the end of the question, which totally changes the meaning! If Dennis actually said this aloud with that emphasis, he’d be asking whether Mr. Wilson liked kids when he was one year old, specifically. And look, I’m no child development expert, but I’m pretty sure most one year olds barely know what other kids are and don’t really have strong opinions on them. Mr. Wilson at age one probably liked having a nipple in his mouth and an absence of sudden loud noises, and that’s a comprehensive list.

The Lockhorns, 2/15/23

I know Loretta being dissatisfied with Leroy’s earning power is one of the core jokes of this strip, but they’ve always been depicted as living in a decently sized suburban home, so I have to assume that Leroy’s decision to do his workout routine immediately behind the living room couch where Loretta is trying to entertain company is a deliberate and aggressive choice. I’m not sure if he’s trying and failing to impress this woman with his physical prowess, or if he’s aiming this behavior and Loretta and it boils down to the buch more basic “God, I hate my wife! Oh, is she not paying attention to me? We’ll fuckin’ see about that.”

Gasoline Alley, 2/15/23

A couple days ago, National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize nominee Joyce Carol Oates tweeted inquisitively about the comic strip Gasoline Alley, becoming the latest in a series of high-profile cultural commentators who are stealing my bit. Anyway, I hope her interest carried through till today, because I think she’d be quite intrigued to learn that the current storyline is about a little boy who’s about to freeze to death in the woods.

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The Lockhorns, 2/6/23

A thing I like about The Lockhorns is that it’s a comic about a marriage that has spiraled into truly dark territory, but most of the individual strips aren’t necessarily about incandescent moments of hate. Instead, you just get a series of small disappointments that add up to a wasted life. Like, today, you have to imagine that Loretta got it into her head that they should be a tea family, or at least that they should try it out, and she went through the trouble of putting together a matching tea set, and now, on morning one, Leroy just stares dully into his cup and is like “enh, let’s not.” Devastating. Devastating! And the most devastating thing is that they can still devastate one another like this, without even thinking about it.

Slylock Fox, 2/6/23

I feel like Weirdly has honestly put more work into his alibi here than he usually does. “Who, me?” he says. “I just got back from bowling. Haven’t even bothered to put my ball away yet, and my phone still hasn’t fully recharged. I was just sitting down to get on the computer and hadn’t even had time to enter my password!” The boiling flask isn’t that suspicious to me, it’s not like Weirdly has ever given the vibe of being really concerned about safety so he could’ve just left it boiling while he was out, or left one of his menagerie in charge of it, like the purple thing or the [record scratch] WAIT HOLD ON A SECOND COURT WEIRDLY HAS A MAX-ANALOGUE SIDEKICK? With the same color/dress scheme except he’s like … a tiny canid predator of some sort? Is that a small fox, specifically chosen to taunt Slylock? More on this story as it develops.

Pluggers, 2/6/23

It’s hard to get more Pluggers that today’s Pluggers, in which a plugger looks more smug than you can possibly imagine after completing a basic task that used to be something everyone did and now is something that nobody actually needs to do.

Shoe, 2/6/23

It looks like, after literally years of me demanding that Shoe start doing jokes that play off the strip’s basic premise, which is that all the characters are birds, that they finally did one. Honestly, I feel nothing about this. Nothing at all. This should be a big day for me, and yet: nothing. Going to go somewhere quiet where I can contemplate what I’m doing with my life for a bit.