Post Content

Gil Thorp, 1/6/23

It saddens me that Marty Moon, Gil’s oldest frenemy, feels like he needs to introduce himself here. Presumably he’s doing it not for Gil’s sake but in the hopes that the local news will broadcast his question and won’t edit out him saying the name of his podcast. Gotta #hustle to build that #brand, Marty! Anyway, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out if Gil is doing some kind of wordplay on “Behind the Playbook” in that last panel, like he’s really saying “under my behind” or something, and have come to the conclusion that he’s actually trying to get this very question into Marty’s head, knowing the Marty’s going to be muttering “did Thorp just call me an ass?” to himself as he edits the podcast and wonders how much longer he can resist the siren song of drink.

Curtis, 1/6/23

Update on this year’s Kwanzaa tale: Joe D. Cawfee, who was born with a head featuring rabbit traits and wished he wasn’t different, had his wish granted by his magic fish, but in an ironic way, whoops! Also, his magic fish dropped dead in the process of granting the wish. Also the Curtis creative team would like to emphasize that you should not interpret this story as implying that the only way to solve conflict is to eliminate differences of all kinds, OK? The Curtis creative team is not going to explain why this guy is named “Joe D. Cawfee” either.

Beetle Bailey, 1/6/23

Remember how in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 the U.S. military and intelligence services went all out to recruit people who could speak Arabic and Persian? Well, we’re a new geopolitcial phase now, and we need everyone who’s ever said that they’re “fluent in sarcasm” in their Twitter bio or Tinder profile to step up and protect our nation from the current threats.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 1/6/23

Ha, get it, because she’s … a carnivorous animal of some kind? Do carnivores date birds, in the Mother Goose and Grimm universe, where most, though not all, of the characters are animals? I was about to apologize for not knowing the world-building rules of the Mother Goose and Grimm universe despite having read the strip for years but you know what? I’m not actually sorry about it! I’m not sorry at all.

Post Content

FOLKS, I neglected in yesterday’s return post to promote the big event of Comics Award Season: The Fifteenth (!) Annual Worthy Awards, in which faithful reader Wanders nominates the best of Mary Worth’s 2022 shenanigans and you, the readers, pick the winners. You’ll be choosing the Panel of the Year, Quote of the Year, outstanding performances from regular and guest characters, and, of course, the most coveted award of all, Outstanding Floating Head. Vote early and often!

Dennis the Menace, 1/3/23

Man, look, I don’t know if the menace here is supposed to be “Ha ha, Dennis thinks his childhood likes and dislikes reflect the overall business climate” or “Ha ha, vegetarians, amiright, even a child knows they’re gross,” but what really bothers me here are the … things … inside the shuttered restaurant. Are they potted plants — like a lot of potted plants, like way too many potted plants for a small space? Are they bowls containing the aforementioned organic vegetarian cuisine, as drawn by someone whose restaurant habits are Applebee’s-centric and this is what they think vegetarians eat? Are they leftover bowls of vegetarian meals that, abandoned by their creators, have sprouted into aggressive, powerful plants that will have their revenge on us? Each option is more unsettling than the last.

Gasoline Alley, 1/3/23

Couldn’t really tell you how Gasoline Alley got to this point but I am amusing myself by trying to figure out what terrible emergency at the North Pole would get Santa to abruptly abandon his tropical vacation. Like, probably a violent elf labor revolt that his trained Pinkertons have been unable to suppress, right? Or maybe word has gotten back that Mrs. Claus is having a dalliance with Jack Frost or something? Honestly, the funniest answer is that Rudolf is trained to summon him on a fake “emergency” if a child insists on talking to him for more than ten minutes during his vacation, and they’re just going to circle back to the beach as soon as the kids leave.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 1/3/23

Meanwhile, diabolical scientists in Mother Goose and Grimm have created a perfume so alluring that it will stir up murderous violence in anyone who so much as sniffs it! Or it’s just deadly poisonous, honestly kind of hard to tell what they’re getting at.

Post Content

Crankshaft, 12/16/22

Hey, did you know that “deja vu” means “seen again,” and that “vu” is the past participle of the verb “voir,” which means “to see,” and that an earlier form of the same French word entered English after the Norman conquest and gave rise to the English word “view”? Or, to put it more succinctly, did you know that “view” and “vu” are basically the same word? And so this isn’t really much of a pun or anything at all? I know the bar for Crankshaft wordplay is very low, but surely it should be higher than this?

Mother Goose and Grimm, 12/16/22

It probably won’t come as surprise to you that I’ve been reading Mother Goose and Grimm for a long time, possible since it first launched in 1984. I have a vague memory that Ralph (the Boston terrier) was not an original character, but was introduced some time into the strip’s run, maybe? But if so he’s been around for years. Years. You’d think … Grimm would know if his friend had a job? Or at least, some politics weird enough that he’d she tears over Mr. Potter?

Crock, 12/16/22

I’d like to think that whoever on the Crock creative team wrote this strip in the 1990s or whenever this first ran had heard of boom boxes, by which I mean had heard the phrase “boom box,” but didn’t really know what they were. A box that booms, probably? That’s why they call it that, right? Not sure what the box looks like, better not draw it, but we can be pretty confident about the booms.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/16/22

You absolutely cannot make me care about this conversation Rex and June are having about not having any more kids, but I am profoundly unnerved by the way each frame is a closer and closer zoom in on one of their faces. Here’s hoping this trend continues and by Sunday we just have word balloons emerging from six panels of undifferentiated, featureless pinky-peach flesh.

Family Circus, 12/16/22

Uh oh! Big Daddy Keane’s gonna get arrested!