Post Content

Slylock Fox, 8/19/24

Slylock is not alarmed because he knows about the square cube law, which dictates that this unnaturally enlarged mosquito’s body will not be able to support his own weight and he will soon die as his respiratory and circulatory systems collapse. We can only pray that Weirdly’s mechanical tinkering with the bug’s brain wiped away his conscious mind so that he doesn’t have to experience the excruciating process.

Mary Worth, 8/19/24

Remember Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus? Well, get ready for the upcoming Ed-Estelle wedding plotline, Veterinarians Think About Sad Dogs Who Want More Pills All Day, While Unpaid Veterinarian Assistants Spiral Into Bridezilla Mania And Possibly Set The Stage For Actual Fightfights At Their Weddings. I’m tentatively into it!

Gasoline Alley, 8/19/24

Sure, you might say that blogging about comics is “pretty easy all things considered” and “not a real job,” but have you considered the untold psychic damage I take every day, for your amusement, as any number of insane comics details burrow permanently into my brain? For instance, years from now, when my mind has turned to soup and I have forgotten the name and face of everyone I ever loved, I guarantee that if you visit me in whatever facility I’m warehoused in and whisper “Chief Meowrice” into my ear, the correct neuron sequence will fire and my mind’s eye will be presented with the image of this horrible French cat advertising pitchman. If I’m lucky, the experience will kill me.

Post Content

Bizarro, 8/17/24

Hey, have you heard of the concept of “burial at sea?” Well, get this, what if there’s a sort of cool party guy — you know, the kind who wears Hawaiian shirts on the regular — who spends a lot of time in hot tubs, and so he requests a “burial at jacuzzi?” Would be pretty funny, right? Not clear if he means his private home jacuzzi, or the one in his condo complex, or just some random jacuzzi in a hotel or gym somewhere, but it would a pretty funny concept if you dumped this guy’s corpse into it, and it slowly bloated and rotted there, and some poor soul stumbled upon it days later, discovering a jacuzzi that has now been turned into an awful soup full of human guts … wait, no, did I say funny? I meant horrible! It would be horrible! Did we already do a cartoon about this, based on the premise from earlier in the paragraph, when it seemed more innocent and carefree? We did? And you’re saying it’s published in newspapers for God and everyone to see? Ah shit ah shit!

Mary Worth, 8/17/24

Oh yeah, also Dr. Ed proposed to Estelle or whatever, which I haven’t bothered talking about because it’s just been two solid weeks of talking about how much they love each other without any hint of upcoming dramatic conflict of any kind. Today, we finally get a glimpse at what an actual story might hold: is it possible that Ed and Estelle are going to be spending too much time together? She already works for him (without pay!) so maybe the scam-prone Estelle is being pulled into a little two-person cult from which she won’t be able to escape. Remember, the court can’t force a wife to testify against her husband for various animal-related crimes, the way it could force a nephew to testify against his uncle!

Post Content

Tina’s Groove, 8/1/24

I’m honestly really starting to enjoy the 15-years-ago-ness of the Tina’s Groove strips offered up daily by the King Features website; for me, that lands in a nostalgic sweet spot that feels much more dated than Crock reruns from the ’90s or whatever. Like, remember the ’00s, when the only thing that could send a text message was a BlackBerry, and if you wanted to send such a message, you would ask your companion politely first? Of course you don’t, because that’s not really how it worked, but I suppose it might be how someone who’d never actually interacted with a BlackBerry user might think it worked.

Anyway, this strip obviously has a more timeless element to it, which is that Tina seems to have gone on a date (?) with a guy who she thought was Amish, but isn’t really. A good clue would’ve been his facial hair: mustaches were so strongly associated with soliders and militarism in early modern Germany that the pacifist Anabaptist sects that were the forerunners to today’s Amish and Mennonites foreswore them, leading to the distinctive chinbeard we associate with them today. Another way she could’ve guessed he wasn’t Amish is that he’s on date with her right now, since that’s pretty antithetical to their whole deal.

Mary Worth, 8/1/24

Don’t forget, Dr. Ed is an accomplished amateur pianist! I myself briefly forgot, and thought that maybe Estelle was doing an outwardly worshipful “Oh!” but an inwardly exasperated “Sigh!” because she actually was sick of his musical stylings, but no, that’s a worshipful “Sigh!” and her inner and outer selves are fully in alignment, which obviously makes for exciting conflict-free storytelling.