Post Content

Mary Worth, 12/17/23

Many years ago, something or some collection of things I said on this site convinced some readers that I was a vegetarian, which anyone who knows me in real life would find very, very funny, given that my diet is mostly predicated on the fact that vegetables are, in my scientific opinion, “yucky.” That said, my wife’s a vegetarian and I generally find cooking with meat kind of a pain anyway, so I do often make use of various meat substitutes, and honestly they’re fine? Like the Morningstar Farms fake fried chicken patties and nuggets aren’t “chicken” per se but are serviceably salty protein delivery mechanisms; and fake beef technology has really improved over the years, with stuff like Beyond and Impossible ground “beef” being … well, distinguishable from the real thing, probably, but also greasy (in a good way) and pretty tasty. They certainly wouldn’t result in even the most hardened carnivore reacting in the kind of disgust Keith is displaying here, unless you’ve talked yourself into hating it in advance.

That said, nothing in those types of burgers could be described as “Soylent,” which is actually the brand name of a vile nutritive slurry invented by a tech guy who hated food and almost certainly had some kind of eating disorder, and which was supposed to substitute for eating altogether. I don’t want to say that this is the first indication that Mary Worth may not have a good handle on what left-wing radicals are actually like, but I will say that Soylent, while technically vegan, had more appeal to people in libertarian tech spaces who wanted to spend all day coding for their startup without pausing to cook or even chew, rather than people who actually strongly identify as vegan. Anyway, Soylent’s heyday seems to have passed, and one of the things it was most famous for was wreaking havoc on your digestive system, so if that really is a Soylent burger, Keith has that to look forward to, I guess.

Marvin, 12/17/23

Obviously the worst part of Marvin is all the piss and shit jokes. But the jokes about the romantic lives of babies? Let’s be real: they’re not great either.

Post Content

Marvin, 12/7/23

Man, if you’re embarrassed about people (and dogs?) seeing the picture of you in the hat why are you … wearing the hat outside where all these other dogs can see you? I feel like this week’s Marvin is really getting into something very heady about the sign and the signified and I am not high enough to follow it.

Shoe, 12/7/23

I appreciate the fact that today’s Shoe goes out of its way to make sure we know these guys are drinking and emotionally opening up to one another right next to the bathroom. Not sure if we’re supposed to think of them as old dudes with bladder control problems or birds with cloacae, but either way they conveniently have only a few steps to cover when nature calls.

Blondie, 12/7/23

Dagwood isn’t upset that Elmo used the newfangled word “influencer”; it’s just that he can’t realistically have been born before about 1969 and is very mad Elmo thinks Bob Hope and Bing Crosby are from “his day”.

Post Content

Marvin, 12/5/23

I actually really enjoy the implication of this cartoon, which is that Bitsy doesn’t understand the idea that having your picture taken results in a image that other people will see — like, he thinks he just has to sit still wearing a dumb hat for a little bit, but once the process is over there will be no further consequences and nobody else will be the wiser about his demeaning little outfit — but he absolutely knows what it means to post something on social media. We need more baroque and weird versions of the “animals in comics have some human knowledge but not all of it” trope! Forget “this dog can write but not spell things properly” gag, give us baffling gaps in understanding like this one!

Mary Worth, 12/5/23

Haha, turns out Brad is here not for Kitty but for Sonia. Specifically, he’s here to collaborate on the “fight the system” t-shirts that are Sonia’s main form of political activism. Were you thinking about supporting the police, the military, or any of the other pillars of traditional American society that also happened to employ Sonia’s absentee father? Well, not if these cool t-shirts have anything to say about it! Anyway, Kitty understands the real problem with this kind of all-branding, no-substance approach to social justice, which is that it can really cramp your style when you’re trying to bring some ex-Marine back home and have sex with him.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/5/23

I’m sorry, are you telling me you couldn’t get a good self-help cult rolling with your program in the 1970s? Maybe you were never the guy to put it into action, then. Maybe you should just let Rene have this one!