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Archive: Lockhorns

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A bit of the old ultra-ennui

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Crankshaft, 7/15/16

The punchline to today’s strip, in which Crankshaft responds to an church volunteer’s innocent attempt to play-act as a carnival barker by pointing out life’s essentially random cruelty, is par for the Funkyverse course, so instead I’d like to point out that our hero is just straight-up covered with filth here. This is actually some admirable continuity from earlier this week, where the jokes were about how Crankshaft is incapable of eating fair food without soiling himself, but it gives a nice touch to today’s strip, where it looks like he’s wandered out of a scene of unspeakable carnage. He gets to lay down this truth bomb on poor straw-hat-boater guy because he’s seen some shit, man.

The Lockhorns, 7/15/16

I guess Leroy’s supposed to have a black eye here, indicating that once again a potentially pleasant evening has ended with him getting punched in the face? But all I can see is the eye makeup that Alex wore in A Clockwork Orange, so I’m assuming that the argument was over whether it’s socially acceptable to cosplay as literary characters when you go over to someone else’s house for drinks.

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Sunday of ennui

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Mary Worth, 6/19/16

So, to recap: there’s absolutely nothing untoward about sexually charged relationships between professors and students, and if you just hunker down and wait for bullying to pass, it probably will! It’s a good thing that the dialogue in this strip is incredibly stilted and unnatural, because otherwise some young person might actually perceive it as good advice.

The Lockhorns, 6/19/16

Maybe it’s the fact that the background of Lockhorns panels always seem to be strangely empty, like the set of Waiting For Godot, but there’s something profound and universal about the characters’ suffering. The strip is always ready to show us how their very specific grievances (being locked in loveless marriage) are just a hair’s breadth away from terrifyingly universal truths (we’re all locked in a meaningless existence in which nobody truly knows anybody else).

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Saturday one-panels

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Lockhorns, 6/4/16

One of the fun things about the United States is that most people learn some fairly specific aspects of very local history when they’re in elementary school that only later do you find out are not globally important facts. Growing up in Western New York, we made Iroquois longhouses out of papier-mâché, whereas our counterparts in California were building Spanish missions. When covering the War of 1812, our teachers described in vivid detail the way the British had cruelly burned down Buffalo, mentioned only in passing that they would go on to do the same to Washington, D.C., and did not at all discuss that the Americans had done it to Toronto first. My wife, who grew up in Washington, Pennsylvania, got the Whiskey Rebellion, so I’m always charmed to see it get a shout-out in print, which doesn’t happen enough for my taste. It even got cut from the Hamilton musical! Anyway, I guess the point here is that Loretta saw the American Revolution as being just the first step towards knitting together a unified political and economic power out of disparate colonies, whereas Leroy saw many of the British taxes and other measures that sparked the revolution as being evil in and of themselves, not just because they were enacted without the colonists’ consent, and also he’s an embarrassing drunk.

Pluggers, 6/4/16

Pluggers will never, ever get healthier. They will just get sicker and sicker until they blessedly die.