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Momma, 7/10/14

For a brief and horrifying moment I was pretty convinced that Momma had descended into full-on nightmare, with its elderly characters’ organs liquifying, leaving them nothing more than wrinkled skin-bags waddling around full of audibly sloshing viscera-slurry. But now I think that maybe this is a pants-wetting joke? Old people have problems with incontinence? Ha … ha? Never have I grasped onto the possibility of an incontinence joke with such desperation.

Herb and Jamaal, 7/10/14

Generic Customer Guy is right to look so dubious about Herb’s dad’s advice. “So … you want me to relentlessly pursue a woman who made her romantic disinterest in me clear not once but twice? Sure, that can only end well for everybody.”

Pluggers, 7/10/14

Sure, most people tune into Pluggers for the lower-middle class exurban cultural resentment, but I think they’re going to like the new creative direction, where it’s just streams of absurdist nonsense, just fine!

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/7/14

The arrival of Loweezy and li’l Bizzy Buzz Buzz at Snuffy’s Den of Bachelor Squalor is such a proudly announced non-sequitur that I immediately assumed Bizzy Buzz Buzz is a beloved recurring character in Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, if by “recurring” you mean “hasn’t appeared once in the 10 years I’ve been reading this strip but they’ve been publishing the damn thing since 1919, so who knows.” Some cursory Googling (ha) didn’t bring up any evidence of this, though it did reveal that Bizzy Buzz Buzz was some kind of motorized pen that looked like a bird that was a popular toy in the ’60s and ’70s. By the way, if you’re looking for some super-depressing anecdotes, you could do worse than looking at classic toy discussion forums, apparently:

Funky Winkerbean, 7/7/14

Funky Winkerbean is sadly cutting away from Les’s artistic despair to focus on its suuuuper boring comics collecting plot, but I do like the fact that Holly is giving a shout-out to Crankshaft in the final panel here. “Hey, remember that monstrous old hatebag who used to drive the bus, who made all the stupid puns? Whatever happened to him?” (Spoiler: he’s a vegetative husk in a nursing home, dying unloved and alone).

Judge Parker, 7/7/14

This is all the same stuff from yesterday, which I’m glad about because yesterday I forgot to make a joke about the fact that Neddy is wearing a sleeveless t-shirt that just says “FRANCE” across the front. Do you think she got it in France? Do you think the French make them specifically to sell to Americans, and then laugh and laugh whenever anyone buys one?

Pluggers, 7/7/14

Not sure how many of you have ever clicked on the “MORE” link next to the archive drop-downs at the top of the site. It takes you to the advanced archives page, where you can search the site for posts with specific comics, on specific dates, and with specific keywords. It’s a nice system, built by my fantastic web developer Adam Norwood, and you should use it to your heart’s content, but really I had it set up for my own use. Sometimes I get a little nagging feeling in the back of my mind to the effect of “did I do this joke before?” and the answer is just a search away:

Anyway, feel free to enjoy the joke I wrote on this subject in October of 2012!

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Funky Winkerbean, 7/2/14

Oh, man, check out how terrified Les looks by the idea that even in the fictional world being weaved by Cable Movie Entertainment, Lisa might live! It’s almost as if her death was the foundation on which he built his entire artistic career and sense of self. It’s almost as if he has to kill her again every day in his mind in order to stay Les. It’s almost as if the thought of Lisa alive, standing before him, and seeing what he’s done with his life for the past decade fills him with a the darkest sort of dread.

Take comfort in our evil screenwriter’s cynicism, Les! He’s declared this ending a “happy moment of some kind of swear word (bullshit maybe? let’s say bullshit)” because he knows just as well as you that nobody lives, nobody ever lives, everybody dies.

Shoe, 7/2/14

Ha ha it’s funny because if this show were still on the air its writer-protagonist might use a contemporary publishing platform, can you even imagine how bizarre that would be

Pluggers, 7/2/14

Ha ha it’s funny because older people prefer the pop music of their own youth to contemporary pop music they are so unique and different it is extremely note- and praiseworthy