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Archive: Momma

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Legacy strip madness

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Blondie, 11/19/15

OK, here’s one of the difficulties in making jokes about aging in an extremely long-running and iconic legacy comic strip. Typically you’d assume that a mother of two teenagers would be somewhere around the 35-50 age range, born in the ’60s at the earliest, and so you can get away with jokes about how ha ha kids today think their parents are so ancient and the parents resent them for it. This extremely doesn’t work in Blondie, though, given that the strip began in 1930 with its title character already a young adult, right around the time the first experimental televisions were being demonstrated. So, like, does Blondie remember when the first TV was invented? “What did you study in French today?” she asks, desperately trying to deflect attention away from her terrifying unaging nature.

The Lockhorns, 11/19/15

As Apartment 3-G lurches towards its demise so blandly that I can’t even bring myself to cover it here, I gotta give kudos to the Lockhorns for shutting down with a shocking, unexpected twist. Loretta kicked Leroy out and will have his mail forwarded to his new address and now the strip is over! Fans everywhere can take heart that this long-suffering couple can finally move on with their lives, emotionally.

Momma, 11/19/15

Momma, too, has unexpectedly decided to end its decades-long run today. This conclusion is a little derivative of the final episode of St. Elsewhere; but still, the revelation that Momma’s “children” are just tiny figurines that she manipulates at her whim explains a lot about the tone of the strip. Anyway, kudos for Momma and the Lockhorns for going out on top! Looking forward to whatever will be taking their place in newspapers nationwide tomorrow, probably a tire ad or something.

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“Oh, thank you, passenger lady! I had no idea!”

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Slylock Fox, 11/2/15

I don’t think we always appreciate how difficult it must be for a human in the post-animapocalypse world of Slylock Fox. Sure, we make fun of Count Weirdly and his bizarrely theatrical lifestyle, or Slick Smitty and his banal little grifts, but the truth is that they’re probably among those humans who have adapted most successfully to the new regime. If you want to know how life is for the average remaining specimen of H. sapiens, check out Weirdly’s unfortunate “assistant”: the tattered clothes, the unkempt beard, the wide, staring eyes that have seen some things. Presumably he got wind of a fellow human who didn’t live out in the woods in fear like, well, like an animal, pounded on the door of Weirdly’s castle hoping to be taken in and nurtured. Instead, he’s being put on display for the amusement of the animal media. Weirdly didn’t even give him a change of clothes, and once that smug fox reveals the scam, presumably Weirdly will blame him and cast him out again, leaving him to fend for himself. Sorry, friend, but if there was some kind of loyalty among humans, the world wouldn’t be the way it is now.

Momma, 11/2/15

I have no idea who this woman is that Francis is hanging out with, but I’m assuming that he and she were smoking a lot of weed before Momma came over and they’re real paranoid she’s going to be able to smell it.

Mary Worth, 11/2/15

MARY WORTH IS TELLING A NEW YORK CABBIE NOT TO TEXT WHILE DRIVING, REPEAT, MARY WORTH IS TELLING A NEW YORK CABBIE NOT TO TEXT WHILE DRIVING, DANGEROUS HILARITY LEVELS AHEAD

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Exhausted long-running comic strips

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Momma, 10/27/15

This strip’s been running for 45 years, OK? You try coming up with new things for Momma to be annoying about. “Not understanding standard English idioms” is certainly preferable to Oedipal horror.

Shoe, 10/27/15

I was going to make fun of the Perfersser to reacting so negatively to this slur against his hometown — he is, with his defeated slouch and his hand at rest inside a chip bag, part of the very problem being mocked — but then I wondered if the whole thing wasn’t a cry for help on the part of the artist. “Look, I thought I could wring endless funnies out of a town of bird-men, but I can’t, OK? I’m bored. I’m so bored. This bird-man who can’t even muster the energy to lift his hand-wing out of the bag of potato chips … that bird-man is me. I am that bird-man.”

Apartment 3-G, 10/27/15

Ooh, Apartment 3-G plans to go out with a bang by assembling all of Margo’s boyfriends at her bedside! That’s Greg, who used to be Margo’s boyfriend and also played James Bond, in the movies, no big deal. Who else will be showing up to proclaim their love to Margo’s unconscious form? Scarf-wearing architect Trey? FBI Pete? Will they be bringing any of Lu Ann or Tommie’s exes with them? (Haha, just kidding, nobody cares about Lu Ann or Tommie’s exes.)