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Mother Goose and Grimm, 7/21/21

Good news, everyone! Like Dennis the Menace, Grimm, the lovable dog from the syndicated comic strip Mother Goose and Grimm, is about to get what he deservers (incarceration in a federal prison).

Dennis the Menace, 7/21/21

Ha ha, just kidding, of course. Dennis remains at large, and in fact his little road trip with the Wilsons is about to come to an end. The adorable tyke is being delivered safe and sound back to his family, who have finally enjoyed enough Dennis-free days to be able to deal with him again. Remember, it takes a village to avoid your child!

Pluggers, 7/21/21

Oh, do you use a scrap of cloth or paper to ensure that you don’t soil yourself and clothes? Well why don’t you go back to communist Europe, you effeminiate weirdo

Sam and Silo, 7/21/21

BORIS JOHNSON: ORIGINS

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/22/21

Look, I thought we had a consensus here: Cartoonists draw the people and animals in their strips in all sorts of whimsical, silly ways that look funny on paper and we think it’s cute, even though if we actually saw a being in the flesh with those proportions, we’d recoil in horror and disgust. But when the actual cartoon character acknowledges his freakish, unnatural form, it quite frankly breaks the spell and forces us to imagine these nightmare beings. Like, can you imagine a horse with no neck? Horses are all neck! Their long, muscular necks are one of the defining features of their body plan! But try visualizing a horse — not a cute cartoon horse, but a real flesh-and-blood thoroughbred — with its head just jammed onto its shoulders. What a nightmare, right? It’s real sick shit, and I’m mad at Barney Google and Snuffy Smith just for making me think about it.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 6/22/21

You know some real sick shit I’m not mad thinking about? Mother Goose (specifically the title character from the popular syndicated newspaper strip Mother Goose and Grimm, to be clear, not just the generic folklore character) down at the blood bank, just wheeze-coughing into blood bags while the nurses there desperately try to get her to stop. Call me mercurial, I guess, but that’s the sort of thing I sincerely enjoy!

Crankshaft, 6/22/21

Another thing I’m enjoying today is Crankshaft’s emotional journey in this strip. “Christmas? In June?” he seems to be thinking in panel two. “Did they move it? Is nothing sacred now that the damn libs are in charge again?” But then in panel three, he’s like, “Ohh, I get it now. It’s wordplay! I love wordplay!”

Important correction to yesterday’s Mary Worth post: When Shauna said that she was working at Santa Roymart, I assumed this was the supermarket where Tommy and Brandy also worked. In fact, as several faithful readers pointed out, those two work at Freda’s, Santa Royale’s upscale market with a personal touch. Santa Roymart is a big box store where Tommy refused to work, possibly because it was the scene of a botched drug raid. Is Shauna in league with the drug dealers who use Santa Roymart’s warehouse as their HQ? Keep reading this blog to find out!

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Crankshaft, 6/9/21

Congratulations to Crankshaft for delivering a strip whose meaning isn’t immediately obvious, but in a way that makes it feel like maybe there’s going to be some character development in the next few days rather than just “oh no, the wordplay is too opaque, we need to ratchet it back by two or three notches.” Anyway, who wants to guess what exactly the ‘Shaft is going on about here? Did he watch the disruption of the coronavirus pandemic and how it caused so many younger people to put their dreams for the future on hold, and it made him realize that he had done that for himself long ago, without even realizing it? Or did he just get bored one night and watched a bad basic cable documentary about REM sleep or something and thought “Huh, I never remember my dreams. Does that mean my brain doesn’t work right? Is that COVID-related? Can I sue someone over this?”

Dustin and Mother Goose and Grimm, 6/9/21

Because human beings are capable of abstract thought, we’ve managed to turn the genetic impulse to look for mates who are physically strong and instead map that onto more abstract signifiers, like the ability to use physical strength for useful purposes, or the acquisition of stored labor value in the form of money. That’s what you’d think based on these strips, anyway, though keep in mind that the message is coming from comics artists, who generally don’t have any of the above qualities to recommend them.