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Slylock Fox, 6/19/23

There was a truly incredible report a few months ago that featured extensive quotes from Taliban fighters who, after spending two decades waging a brutal and ultimately successful guerilla war against the mightiest superpower the world has ever known, found to their great surprise and disgust that running the country they had conquered mostly entailed sitting in an office building in Kabul and writing a lot of emails. This was what popped into my mind immediately upon reading this, and for some reason I find this a much funnier and more incongruous scenario than these sapient animals stealing jewels from each other or whatever. These creatures rose up and dispossessed the dominant species of planet Earth, in a paroxysm of genocidal violence, with the intention of building their own civilization in the ruins! And now they’re hacking into one another’s email accounts in order to frame each other for the crime of sending mean notes? The creatures looked from funny animal to man, and from man to funny animal, and from funny animal to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Hagar the Horrible, 6/19/23

I genuinely love how distressed this Hagar’s victim looks in panel two here. He lives in the civilized Carolingian realm, and probably he though that the days of violent Teutonic justice and trial by combat were over; now disputes are settled peacefully in accordance with civil law in the Emperor’s courts. But here are a couple violent men with weapons, sent (or so he thinks) by his wife’s vengeful family, here to make it very clear that, if you cross the wrong people, the old ways are still very much alive.

The Lockhorns, 6/19/23

I am frankly quite pleased to see the whole crypto/web3 scene go through multiple hype and boom/bust cycles to finally achieve its final form: something used in a syndicated newspaper comic strip as a well-understood shorthand for “a topic the most irritating person you meet at a party would talk to you about.” I only find this strip unbelievable because I am 100% certain that Leroy doesn’t need anything explained to him, because he has lost a substantial amount of money in crypto.

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 6/18/23

This image is, quite frankly, one of the most horrifying that Slylock Fox has presented me with in all my years of reading and commenting on this strip. I suppose Weirdly imagined that his genetically modified mega-bee would itself be able to use its powerful stinger to attack his enemies and fetch its own honey, but thanks to the square cube law its insectoid anatomy means it can barely move, so it spends its days in a cage in Weirdly’s basement, dragging itself over to bowls of honey that someone else has to steal for it. We don’t have any indication that this bee is sapient like the other animals, and truly it would be a blessing if it weren’t, as an intelligent mega-bee would have nothing to do all day but contemplate the innate wrongness of its own existence.

Shoe, 6/18/23

Speaking of fucked up animal business, imagine if you were a mortician and you came into your showroom one day only to find some old guy in there sticking his head into the coffins, taking big sniffs and making satisfied sounds. I know morticians see a lot of stuff that would haunt us normies but this one would have to unsettle even them. Not sure how both the mortician and the old guy being birds would affect things but I can’t imagine it would help.

Gasoline Alley, 6/18/23

Can you imagine how annoying someone’s on-stage patter must be if you get up and demand that they start playing music while they’re in the middle of an anecdote about how people don’t like their music? Rufus must be even more irritating in person than he comes across on the page.

Panel from The Lockhorns, 6/18/23

I’ve never watched Bridgerton, but through cultural osmosis have learned that much of the first season’s plot revolves around a sexually naive young woman whose husband keeps using the withdrawal method and who slowly comes to understand that this is why she isn’t getting pregnant, which means that, to be blunter, much of the first season’s plot revolves around semen, so it’s fun to rate how unsettling it is to imagine various comics characters having in-depth conversations about it. Jeremy Duncan and his mom? Not great. Crankshaft? Very bad. Leroy and Loretta Lockhorn? Hoo boy.

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Judge Parker, 6/15/23

Sorry you’re a coward, Sophie, but I actually would’ve liked to have seen the process by which Abbey decided to “get back out there” on the dating scene, and am definitely curious about which apps she used, considering that she’s the richest person in town and just had a very public failed campaign for mayor driven by revenge for having been falsely accused of burning down her own B&B. Was she on Raya, the dating app exclusively for celebs, rich people, and the celeb/rich people adjacent? Does Raya do local matches, or was she just getting a bunch of silver-haired finance guys in NYC or London? Did the pic where she “felt cute” look like this surreal nightmare?

The Lockhorns, 6/15/23

This joke is enh but I am very charmed by the way the bartender is smiling at that bottle in the background. “Oh, brown liquor,” he’s thinking to himself, “you and I have brought happiness to so many people! We’re a great team!”

Hagar the Horrible, 6/15/23

Wow, I’ve spent so much time on this blog trying to figure out where exactly in the late Carolingian era Hagar the Horrible takes place, only to learn today that Hagar’s civilization is actually part of the pre-Deluge world as described in the Book of Genesis! Definitely this is a society that is corrupt before God and filled with violence, so this adds up.