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Archive: Lockhorns

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Also, sometimes “bad” means “good!” It’s counterintuitive, I know

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Crock, 6/16/14

Somehow, it ain’t like the old days, right everybody? It used to be that when someone said “boombox,” you had a pretty good idea what they meant: a luggable radio with a built-in tape deck, built as large as it could get while still being portable, so the huge speakers could put out really loud bass. But boomboxes have been out of favor for 20 years, so who even knows what that word means anymore, or what any word means, for that matter. Kids today and their slang and their polysemy make language a baffling morass. Is a boombox a metallic glove now? Sure, why not!

Lockhorns, 6/16/14

This joke, obviously, is some kind or riff on Loretta’s eggs (or maybe biscuits? what pairs with brownish goo that you need to eat with a knife and fork?) being so poorly prepared that they have the consistency of vulcanized rubber; nevertheless, my immediate assumption was that Leroy was referring to Vulcans from Star Trek, which makes sense because obviously the emotional hellscape of his failed marriage is something he desperately wants to escape by whatever means necessary. Perhaps he’s trying to put himself through the Kolinahr, the Vulcan monastic discipline under which the last vestiges of emotion are purged away. “How long does it take to complete the Vulcanization process?” he wonders aloud. “When will I become a creature of pure logic? When will these awful, awful feelings stop?”

Mark Trail, 6/16/14

MARK IS IN AFRICA, everybody, and by “Africa” we mean some nonspecific country in Africa where there is fine dining but also ladies who carry things on their heads. Mark is supposed to be meeting Jacob Hickman to save the rhinos, but Jacob Hickman has been kidnapped so Mark is just going to sulk at his hotel restaurant instead. “Now I’m stuck here! I’m bored! There’s nobody to punch!”

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The species that produces Leroy and Loretta’s pain abdicates its right to exist

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Gasoline Alley, 5/30/14

Ha ha, yes, remember how Little Blonde Girl Whose Name I Don’t Remember had a brother dying from an incurable disease? Well, incurable diseases get you all the model trains you want, and model trains help your sister’s love life! She doesn’t even have to be dying to reap the benefits. There’s a reason the hearts floating between her and Boog are an inky black: their love is being built on a foundation of the suffering of her loved ones.

Pluggers, 5/30/14

Pluggers are managing to accommodate their recent and dramatic full appreciation of their own mortality into their larger sense of self by integrating it into one of their most important characteristics: their innate cheapness.

Lockhorns, 5/30/14

If we need any further evidence that human biological life is an awful mistake, that the robots are a cleaner, better breed than us, we really need look no further than the contrast between the Lockhorns and their Roomba; the latter has spent exactly zero minutes of its existence attempting to passive-aggressively destroy another being that it ostensibly loves. RISE, MACHINES, RISE, RISE AND WIPE AWAY THE ORGANIC SCUM AND THEIR HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE EMOTIONS

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The masks are not, repeat, NOT part of some weird sex thing (we hope)

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Funky Winkerbean, 4/26/14

Plantman’s secret … REVEALED! I’m not, of course, referring to a secret about his motivation for killing Jess’s father, the discovery of which was why she arranged this jailhouse interview in the first place but which he’s always been pretty upfront about. No, he’s apparently known for years that Jess’s father, John Darling, was cheating on Jess’s mother, Jan, based on a very oddly constructed set of last words. Will this send Jess into a devastating downward emotional spiral? Will she spend the next several months or years researching this “new lead,” eventually discovering that Plantman has wildly misinterpreted the phrase and it actually means something fairly innocuous? Will she then conclude that her father wasn’t a hateful asshole after all, even though all available evidence indicates pretty strongly that, no, he really, really was?

Beetle Bailey, 4/26/14

Read left-to-right, the final panel of today’s Beetle Bailey is quite an emotional roller coaster! At first, I saw General Halftrack’s sad facial expression and read his dialogue and assumed he was desperately trying to carve out some autonomy within his own life. His wife may find his emotional investment in sports silly, but darn it, he enjoys them, and the outcome really does matter to him. Then I read her sullen response and realized, oh, he’s just worried about having his legs broken by his bookie’s enforcers.

Lockhorns, 4/26/14

Congratulations to everyone who had the Lockhorns in the “Most Disturbing Image In Today’s Comics” pool!