Post Content

Daddy Daze, 2/19/20

Daddy Daze Daddy’s long-term plan to teach his baby to destroy … to wreak havoc … to kill … is coming along nicely!

Mother Goose and Grimm, 2/19/20

Here’s today’s Mother Goose and Grimm! It’s about a dog who just pisses all over a seat in a movie theater.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/19/20

I love how Tildy is staring knowingly over her soda can at Rex in panel two. She may be a little dotty, but she definitely can feel the gears of narrative convenience churning to push her towards an ending of happy heteronormative monogamy, and she does not care for it.

The Lockhorns, 2/19/20

Sure, it’s because Leroy and Loretta, like many cartoon characters, only have four digits on each hand, but I cannot imagine anything more on-brand than the Lockhorns wearing their wedding rings on their middle fingers.

Mark Trail, 2/19/20

“Quick, we’ve got to get out of here, before he finds us!”

Post Content

Daddy Daze, 1/30/20

So this week I’ve decided to add some new strips to my rotation, and one of them is Daddy Daze, billed by King Features as being about “Paul, the single dad who amicably shares custody of little Angus with ex-wife Amy, as he juggles an at-home job and domestic duties.” Admittedly I’ve only been reading it for a week or so, but it seems to be more about “Paul, a single dad imprisoned in some featureless void with only a preverbal infant for company, eventually driven to madness by his loneliness and inventing increasingly deranged and nightmarish imagery out of his son’s babbling.” It’s real grim stuff.

Judge Parker, 1/30/20

So one of the ongoing Judge Parker plots is that Sophie, still suffering PTSD after her kidnapping, is, much to Abbey’s consternation, hesitant to apply to college because really, why bother, why should we act like any of us have a future, anyway? But it seems she’s now discovered a way to add meaning in her life at least in the short term, by helping her family friend and actual criminal Judge Parker Emeritus get elected mayor. Sophie’s political views are somewhat eclectic, ranging from “climate change is bad” to “any self-respecting polity ought to have a fleet of secret flying death robots to wreak havoc on its enemies,” so she should do great with Future Mayor Parker’s campaign, which mostly seems based on the idea that “Uh hey guys I went to jail for a while and it turns out jail sucks.”

The Lockhorns, 1/30/20

Have I ever liked Leroy Lockhorn? No, of course not. He is, inherently, not a likable character. But do I want to see him hurled to his death off the roof of whatever depressing suburban office building he works in? No. That’s too much. It’s too much!

Post Content

Panel from Slylock Fox, 1/26/20

When I was a kid, presumably after I had burned through the entire Encyclopedia Brown corpus, I got way into T*A*C*K, a series of children’s’ books that made so little impact on our collective cultural memory that it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia article, just one on TV Tropes. The books featured four kids who solved … not mysteries, exactly; more like petty real-life annoyances, through puzzle-logic that would be familiar to anyone reading Slylock Fox. Though I’m sure I read all four books, I only actually remember two of the stories in any detail: one where the little brother of one of the protagonists was at a sleepover at someone’s house and there was a cat there and he was allergic but had forgotten his medicine at home and didn’t have a key (the kid loved cats and it made him so sad and as I cat-loving kid I felt very bad for him; I do not remember how the mystery was solved) and one where two characters are arguing over how to fairly cut up a birthday cake, with the proposed solution — one person cuts the cake and the other chooses a piece — being functionally identical to the one proposed here. Anyway, the actual answer to the question posed is that these artifacts belong in a museum, and if our two treasure hunters deliver them to the nearest undersea archaeologists together, they’ll be able to equally share the pride in doing the right thing, which is an infinite resource for those who deserve it.

The Lockhorns, 1/26/20

A lot of Leroy and Loretta’s gripes about each other are exaggerated and performative, but I always assumed there’s a grain of truth to it when Loretta belittles Leroy for not making enough money. That was before I found out they took a vacation to Niagara Falls, Rome, Venice, Scotland, and Greece, though.

Family Circus, 1/26/20

Wait, who’s the dead dude in yellow crawling around on a cloud listening to the prayers of other people’s grandkids? Since his soul is in Paradise, forever in the radiance of our Creator Himself, doesn’t he have literally an infinite number of better things to do?