Post Content

Curtis, 2/4/15

This week’s Curtis has features Curtis’s dad going on and on about this collection of music “I grew up with” as performed by extremely non-specific “legendary” artists, who, we learn today, are not rappers. One assumes that these legendary artists are never named so that this plotline can be trotted out every few years while keeping Greg the same age, but the whole thing already seems on the edge of believability: with a couple of pre-teen kids and a wife not notably younger than him, it seems unrealistic to have Greg be much older than his mid-40s, which would mean he hit his musical stride right as hip-hop was starting to enter the musical mainstream. Ten years from now, it will be actively strange if he grew up not listening to rap, although who knows, maybe it’ll be just as strange if Curtis is listening to it.

Pluggers, 2/4/15

See, Curtis? Even Pluggers is admitting that most people in the plugger demographic in 2015 were filthy hippies in their youth. Just admit that Curtis’s dad likes old-school rap already.

Judge Parker, 2/4/15

Any chance that this angry fellow, who claimed earlier to have some pull with important politicians, might actually have pull with important politicians has just gone out the window as he used “the fed” to refer to some random non-Federal Reserve government agency. Sam, whose returns on capital vary between the staggering and the completely flabbergasting based on Fed decisions on interest rates and quantitative easing and such, is very much not impressed. It would be fun if this guy really were talking about the actual Fed, though. “We need the Fed working on this! Do you think fiat money can clear that road? Only a strong gold-based currency can restore our nation’s highways!”

Crankshaft, 2/4/15

In today’s fractured media landscape, there are still specialized audiences who aren’t being catered to — fans of watching angry, unsympathetic old men being sexually humiliated in public, for instance. One bold comic strip aims to meet this need.

Momma, 2/4/15

For a brief moment, Francis catches a glimpse of what it might be like to feel real human joy — and sees just enough to know that the experience is completely beyond him.

Post Content

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/29/15

I’m not sure which I find more jarring here: the fact that Jughaid has used the flatlander term “spoiler alert” (in Hootin’ Holler, as in many traditional cultures, entertainment takes the form of bards putting their own spin on endless variations of well-known narratives, so the very idea of a novel, linear plot with a surprising ending would be foreign to these children), or the fact that the normally raven-haired Miz Prunelly is suddenly a blonde.

Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean, 1/29/15

Well, the Dick Tracy-Funky Winkerbean crossover is over, but the Funkyverse still has CROSSOVER FEVER!!!!! With nobody currently willing to cross over with it, though, it’s been forced to mingle timelines with … itself. Yes, there’s now a cross-decade Funky Winkerbean–Crankshaft narrative confluence in progress, about Crankshaft driving beloved (?) band leader Harry Dinkle and the band to some band championship or something. Funky’s installments are using Old Timey Photo Album Frame panels, the strip’s sign for Things That Happened Long Ago, which is confusing since both strips take place more or less in the present. All this timestream mucking about mainly serves to sadly let us know that, since Crankshaft’s life continues beyond this adventure, Harry will never make good on his promise to slide that baton straight through Crankshaft’s leathery old flesh and right into his black, shriveled heart.

Six Chix, 1/29/15

One good thing about having a nationally syndicated comic strip: when you experience some minor irritation in your daily life, the rapidly aging and declining comics-reading demographic will get to hear about it, by God.

Pluggers, 1/29/15

The only time pluggers will be addressed with the slightest glimmer of dignity is when they are already in the grave.

Post Content

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/23/15

Oh hey were you wondering what was going with the story of Kelly the teen, who’s being gifted with a free car and a zero-tolerance contract in order to ferry around Sarah Morgan and fulfill the nebulous art-education whims of a lovable old gangster moll? (Haha, I love trying to construct the most implausibly absurd sentences that are nevertheless 100% accurate descriptions of soap opera plots.) Anyway, Bugsy the driver, who is totally reformed and absolutely no longer a brutal mob enforcer, probably, is taking Kelly to get her free car, and it’s a hearse! It’s also free to Bugsy and Mrs. P., because of some ill-defined relationship between garishly suited hearse salesman “Tony” and Mrs. P.’s criminal syndicate. When Bugsy says Mrs. P. “sends her best to you and your family,” does that mean that Tony’s family has now been released from captivity? When Tony thanks Bugsy for “what she did for us,” is that a reference to her mob’s long reign of violent terror really boosting the market for hearses?

Pluggers, 1/23/15

You know you’re a plugger when you’ve never cooked anything even remotely healthy in your entire life.