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Archive: Marvin

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A fire hydrant but no explicit piss joke? Will wonders never cease

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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”.

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Brad stays “hot headed” and radical by wearing a dumb hat

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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!

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That’s former prison woman to you, lady

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Hi and Lois, 11/15/23

The sun won’t blast off its outer layers, forming a planetary nebula and leaving only a tiny white dwarf behind, for another seven to eight billion years or so, and while that is the unfathomably distant future, it’s not strictly speaking correct to say that Trixie’s best friend will last “forever.” Still, Sunbeam will be around for a lot longer than Suzy here, who even in a best-case scenario will be dead by sometime in the 2110s.

Marvin, 11/15/23

If you had told me in the abstract that Marvin wanted to branch out beyond “Ha ha, Marvin has shat himself and is proud of it” jokes, I would obviously endorse it. But please, do not waste your time and mine with marital misanthropy jokes that are two orders of magnitude too unfunny to make it in The Lockhorns! Better poop than this!

The Phantom, 11/15/23

Yes, The Phantom is still somehow doing the “Death of the Phantom” arc, and no, I’m still not going to catch you up on the details. But I do need to point out that this strip, which has never been shy about tastefully implied nudity, has just discovered the funniest ever use of a word balloon.