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Panel from Slylock Fox, 12/11/22

There’s a lot going on in this panel — Max trying and failing to pump iron; how peevish the alligator gym attendent is about this crime; “Biceppe’s”; the fact that Harry Ape is wearing a fedora to the gym — and I love all of it. I also love the solution to the mystery, which plays on our idea that ape feet are really pretty hand-like, so it makes sense that they’d leave prints, but also lets us know that human toeprints could be used as evidence as well, so you’d better not be out there committing crimes barefoot. Anyway, it’s really too bad for Harry that when the ascendent animals took over the wreckage of our civilization, they couldn’t figure out our advanced “gloves, but for feet” technology.

Mary Worth, 12/11/22

I honestly cannot get over the fact that Iris is more or less ignoring the weird hot babysitter sexual roleplay vibe Zak and Nan have been putting out for this entire encounter and only seems to care about how much she and Nan look alike. (And I guess that Nan can’t remember her name, which is genuinely annoying.) Anyway, she seems not to be hung up on the age gap thing at the moment, so it’s good that she didn’t verbalize the Doublement commercial joke, because they haven’t aired those since the mid ’80s and Zak definitely would not get it.

Hi and Lois, 12/11/12

Every once in a while Hi and Lois decides its mission is to paint an uncompromising portrait of middle-class suburban life. Like today, for instance, when the joke is that a man has cheaped out on a Christmas tree, then tried and failed to lie to his wife about it.

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Funky Winkerbean, 12/06/22

It probably shouldn’t surprise you to learn I have been a daily comics reader for more or less my entire life. But until I really got started on this blog, that meant that I read the daily comics that were printed in whatever newspaper I was reading at the time, which meant there was a decade-long gap in my daily Funky Winkerbean readership straddling Y2K, a period during which the strip made its now-infamous Turn To Grim, and even now I’m still putting together the pieces of what all happened in the strip during that stretch. Like, someone bombed the Westview post office? Sure, why not!

One thing I do know happened during that period is that Lisa had breast cancer, then went into remission, then her cancer came back, but the hospital mixed up her lab results so she was told she was fine and the whole thing wasn’t figured out until it was too late. In the real world, this is the sort of mistake that would have resulted in multiple lawsuits, and in a world where a janitor from the future was subtly manipulating things behind the scenes, it seems like it would be a very easy mistake to fix, certainly easier than convincing a top neonatal physician to keep living it a shitty town like Westview. But you have to remember that Lisa was primarily important as the Birthing Vessel for the Chosen One, so once Summer was born, all extraordinary or indeed ordinary measures to keep her alive immediately ceased.

Dennis the Menace, 12/6/22

What exactly is Alice forbidding Dennis from doing in the first panel here? Is she telling him that, as five-year-old children, he and Joey are not allowed to just wander out into the wintertime by themselves? Because it doesn’t seem to have worked.

The Lockhorn, 12/6/22

You have to respect how big a production Leroy and Loretta make out of passive-aggressively trying to destroy each other emotionally, like with props and everything. That’s how they keep things fresh!

Mary Worth, 12/6/22

Look, I understand the dramatic reasons why we’re spending today’s strip on Iris’s inner monologue, but frankly I’m much more interested in finding out whether or not Nan is making airplane noises as she feeds Zak.

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Dick Tracy, 12/4/22

Look, here’s a tough message to all you “social justice warriors” out there: if you would simply allow police to do their jobs by hounding suspects to their ironic deaths, and if juries on the trials for those few cases where someone survives to go to court would just “serve cheerfully and use [their] best judgement” (i.e., convict in all cases) as the Crimestoppers Textbook suggests, then we could all live in a utopian paradise like Neo-Chicago, where selling counterfeit animation cels to furries is a crime considered major enough to attract the Major Crime Unit’s attention.

Gasoline Alley, 12/4/22

America’s population, and its newspaper comics reading population in particular, is rapidly aging, and many yearn for simple pleasures, like having a live-in domestic servant with whom they can share a laugh over alliteration in news articles. Sadly, thanks to out-of-control inflation in servant wages, most cannot afford that luxury, and must be satisfied with its depiction in Gasoline Alley, the old person’s comic of choice for extremely low-stakes chuckles.

Mary Worth, 12/4/22

OK, Iris, I know you’re very fixated on the physical similarities between you and Nan, but I think you do need to spend some time emotionally dealing with “yummy yummy yummy… for my tummy tummy tummy!” If you don’t nip this in the bud now, it absolutely will be part of your wedding vows.

Beetle Bailey, 12/4/22

Love the fact that, in his addled ramble around the house, General Halftrack managed to acquire a healthy pour of brown liquor. My man’s getting up there in years, but he’s still got it! (The “it” is of course a debilitating alcohol problem.)