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Shoe, 1/19/24

I was going to go on a long rant here about how comics gag writers so frequently come up with a joke and then work backwards from it even if it doesn’t make sense in the strip’s established universe of characters, and why would the Perfesser be interested in a cruise like this when he doesn’t even have kids, but then, ha ha, I realized I had forgotten about his nephew-ward Skyler. In my defense, I think the Perfesser also forgets about his nephew-ward Skyler on the regular. Anyway, there’s absolutely no chance he’s going to take this child on a cruise with him. He won’t even buy a second piece of living room furniture so they can eat in front of the TV together.

Hi and Lois, 1/19/24

I feel like I come across on this blog as some kind of hardass for comedic structure but I’m really not! Take this Hi and Lois, for instance: I honestly enjoyed it even though it contains literally nothing that you could call a “joke” per se. Hi’s contorted body language on the coach is great, but the punctuation mark-less “AAAEEUGH” is what really seals the deal for me. Sometimes comics can just be vibes and that’s OK!

Mary Worth, 1/19/24

“Used to be you could just skip town and move to California and change your name to an obviously fake one and that was that! Nobody would blink an eye! You could start over! Then came Mr. Science sticking his nose in where it didn’t belong. And that’s when you have to start poisoning people with muffins.”

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Dustin, 1/18/24

I think my record on the themes and narrative content of Dustin is pretty clear — I find them extremely objectionable, perhaps more than any other comic in my daily rotation — but I generally don’t say much about the art. It’s — well, “good” might be pushing it, but it’s generally perfectly workmanlike and occasionally shows flashes of charm. The one thing about it I don’t like is the weird way that the character’s eyes switch back and forth between stylized pupils-and-sclerae (as in panel two here) and simple black dots (as in panel three). Maybe this doesn’t jump out at you in black and white (which I still consider the canonical format for a daily strip), but in today’s scenario it honestly feels like we’re going from them talking normally about teenage boy trouble to their eyes suddenly going inky black and their voices shifting to an ominous thrumming as they say in unison “THE HANDSOME LAD, THE PRETTY ONE … HE HAS WRONGED US AND HE MUST BE DESTROYED.”

Gil Thorp, 1/18/24

Keri has been selling the “Pedro ghosted me!” sob story to anyone who’ll listen for a while now, but honestly it feels more like “Pedro is experiencing a major depressive episode that isn’t actually about me”? This is, I imagine, a fairly accurate example of a teenage reaction, though.

Mary Worth, 1/18/24

My immediate reaction to this strip was “Oh my god was this just setting up a MARY WORTH HAS A SECRET DAUGHTER PLOT????” Now, obviously, you’re going to dismiss that as anatomically impossible, but remember that Mary firmly believes that you can overcome past trauma simply by refusing to remember that it ever happened, so it’s more likely than you’d think!

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Mary Worth, 1/15/24

Well, thank God, surely now that this Mary Worth story has wrapped up in the most boring manner possible we can move on to something more interesting, and … wait, what’s this? Keith and Kitty are “giv[ing] in to their growing attraction,” right there in the car, front of God and Mary Worth readers everywhere? I can’t believe we’re about to see something so explicit, so filthy, that … oh, thank goodness, Keith just referred to food you buy at a grocery store as “dinner items,” no libido no matter how powerful can survive the sexlessness of that wording. Things are going to go back to normal (non-horny) soon enough!

Gil Thorp, 1/15/24

Ah, whoops, it looks before he even had a chance to menace Gil and our heroes, Coach Perm was felled by a swift punch to the gut from one of his own players. Welp, problem (?) solved (???), let’s go see what Coach Ochoa and the hockey team is up to for the rest of the week.