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Shoe, 7/9/21

A few weeks ago, faithful reader Tabby Lavalamp raised questions in a COTW runner up about why the notoriously heard-hearted Shoe would accompany the Perfesser on a tender-hearted errand. It stuck with me and was definitely the first thing I thought about today, as Shoe has not only accompanied his employee to the latter’s uncle’s grave (signs of multigenerational newphewism?), but has brought a bouquet of flowers along as well. Anyway, the reason Shoe actually goes along on these trips is that there needs to be another bird-person present so that the exchange of dialogue that creates these joke-like utterances can happen, but today’s strip did make me wonder if he’s actually there as part of his journalistic mission. There isn’t a lot of news in Treetops and anything sensational could make a good story that would get people sharing links to treetopstattler.bird on Facebook, and he’s always had a gut feeling that there was more to this uncle business. So the guy died in some unexpected and perhaps shocking way due to a terrible mistake he made, huh? Sounds interesting. Putting that gruesome tale into the newspaper might be a cruel thing to do one of the paper’s longest-suffering employees, but don’t let the flowers fool you: Shoe’s no softie.

The Lockhorns, 7/9/21

Meanwhile, it looks like the Lockhorns’s Featured Brands program is off to a great start! Congrats to Ann Taylor for partnering with this universally beloved feature, which is bound to portray their brand in a positive light!

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Funky Winkerbean, 7/3/21

You might recall (or you might not, because why would you, honestly) that “Flash Freeman” and “Ruby Lith” are two unjustly forgotten (fictional) figures from the Golden Age of Comics (or honestly maybe the Silver Age, I don’t have a firm grasp on either when the various Comics Ages were or where the current Funky Winkerbean timeline stands relative to actually historical dates) who came back to work at Batom Comics with Darrin and Mopey Pete. Anyway, the good new is that now they’re being recognized more and more, and honestly it’s an extremely Funky Winkerbean thing to make up a character out of whole cloth and then try to spin approbation they receive as a feel-good triumph-of-the-underdog story. It’s also an extremely Funky Winkerbean thing for that approbation to attract sinister, unwanted attention, so I assume that’s what’s going on here.

The Lockhorns, 7/3/21

Well, it looks like they finally imprisoned the Lockhorns in that plastic jail where they put Magneto in the first X-Men movie, just like I’ve been urging all this time!

Mary Worth, 7/3/21

Yes! That’s right, ladies! Don’t attack each other! FIGHT THE REAL ENEMY

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/20/21

Since Rex Morgan plots move in excruciating slow motion, we’ve all basically been waiting for weeks now for this moment, where best-selling but writers-blocked graphic novelist “Kyle Vidpa” gets Sarah’s epic fan letter (which almost certainly contains extensive drawings and plot suggestions for future Kitty Cop installments) and realizes it’s genius. There are two potential futures here: one is that “Kyle” steals the ideas for the new book his publisher demands, and the other is that he brings in Sarah as a “guest writer” and she achieves riches and universal acclaim. The first route seems unlikely since the story so far has gone out of its way to show that “Kyle” is a nice guy with a sweet wife and doting parents and a good friend in Buck Wise, who is sadly the center of the Rex Morgan, M.D., universe now, while the second starts to get us on the track of “Sarah is a terrifyingly talented and uncanny child-adult” that Terry Beatty amnesia’d his way out of when he took over the strip. Seems like we’ve painted ourselves into a real corner, how will we get out of it? (PREDICTION: It won’t be very interesting.)

Hi and Lois, 6/20/21

Today in “strips that don’t usually make me laugh for the intended reasons but did today” is Hi and Lois. I absolutely love the contrast between how happy Hi looks in the imagined version of this carefully programmed Father’s Day that was clearly designed by a five-person committee and how completely overwhelmed he looks in real life contemplating how exhausting this is going to be.

Panels from The Lockhorns, 6/20/21

Speaking of irony-free praise for comics, the Sunday Lockhorns grab-bag had not one but two bangers today. The first one manages to pull off two gags (Leroy was snoring loudly in church, Leroy is transparently ogling some other woman) without feeling like it’s putting a hat on a hat. The second one is just laser focused on a single, beautiful joke about how Leroy was seriously injured in a car accident.

Six Chix, 6/20/21

Wait, so, is this how matryoshka dolls reproduce? The big doll births a smaller doll inside herself, possibly hollowing herself out in the process, and then that doll, still entirely enclosed by her “mother,” produces a smaller internal doll, and the sequence goes on like that, excruciating birth following excruciating birth? And can we safely assume this is an act of parthenogenesis, with no male doll involved at all? Happy Father’s Day indeed!