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Curtis, 7/9/23

As part of my mission to say nice things about comics when I enjoy them, I really enjoyed this Curtis! Basically I spent the whole strip thinking “Is he visualizing an eye roll or is he just thinking the words ‘eye roll’?” only to get the payoff in the next to last panel. A fun little game played with the conventions of comics and the nature of cognition itself (can we even say for sure if thinking involves words rather than concepts?). Kudos for Curtis!

Mary Worth, 7/9/23

You know who doesn’t get any kudos is me, because while I showed you vigilante Mary yesterday, I failed to show you Friday’s strip, which made it clear that she’s enjoying on one of her own blueberry muffins during her stakeout. Thank goodness for the Sunday strips, which recapitulate such important information for occasional readers! Anyway, what do you think happened to that half-eaten muffin between panels 5 and 7? Did Mary carefully place it on the napkin she had previously unfolded on the passenger seat, or, in her haste to grab her binoculars, did she let it tumble to the floor at her feet? (The floor mats in her car are of course immaculate, so even in the latter case she’ll be free to pick it up and continue her noshing at her leisure.)

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Mary Worth, 7/8/23

Huh, I guess the way that Mary is going to help out the police is to take to the streets herself as a cold-hearted vigilante who doesn’t abide by “the rules” that say it’s illegal to feed Lyle Lovett to his own fighting dogs while he begs for mercy. I’m not sure we ever expected to see Mary go stone cold killer in this strip — she usually passive-aggressively gets others to do her dirty work for her — but nobody ever messed around with people’s dogs before in her presence. (Mary would kill for dogs, but would never be so gauche as to actually have one in her home, due to all her delicate knickknacks and furniture coverings and such.)

Dennis the Menace, 7/8/23

I’m loving how Dennis took something insanely wholesome — enjoying some quality time with his dad at an old-fashioned soda fountain — and made it at least moderately menacing. What about nutrition, dad? Did you ever think of that? Eh? Early onset type 2 diabetes? Eh? Eh?

Crock, 7/8/23

What do you suppose that Crock (the character) and/or Crock (the creative team behind the syndicated newspaper comics strip) think a migraine is? Discuss.

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Slylock Fox, 7/6/23

I have come to accept that, in the post-Animalpocalypse world of Slylock Fox, one of the Transformations is that the relative sizes of the various vertebrate creatures seems to have changed in inconsistent and inscrutable ways — so that, for instance, Slylock Fox and Cassandra Cat are more or less as tall as the few remaining humans, while Max Mouse remains a tiny rodent, albiet one wearing shorts and an adorable little hat custom-made for his tiny noggin. But what still unnerves me are the giant insects. I didn’t care for Count Weirdly’s mega-bee and I don’t care for whatever dog-sized bug is marring this otherwise idyllic scene. Not into it! Not into it at all!

Six Chix, 7/6/23

A fun fact is that verb forms like “hath” used to just be how normal people talked but once they fell into disuse and were only encountered by most people in Chaucer or Shakespeare or the King James Bible, they got coded in our collective minds as “literary.” What I’m trying to say is that there ought to be a better way to mark out this chicken as a lover of literature. Maybe you could just show him reading a book?

Mary Worth, 7/6/23

“I’m going to go down to the station and update them on all the wild, evidence-free speculation we’ve been doing over the past few days and demand they take action based on it. Cops love that shit, is my understanding!”