Post Content

Slylock Fox, 2/21/23

So I guess these nightmare-bugs are supposed to be … termites? Or some other horrible bug that feasts on wood, but I’m not going to bother researching what that might be because I’d probably end up seeing actual photographs of these nightmares, which is definitely not something I’m up for. My point, though, is that clearly whatever sinister process granted sapience to the animals of the Slylockverse did so to even the very tiny and very gross among them. The question that today’s strip raises is whether these bugs, as part of their transformation, achieved human-scale proportions in defiance of the square-cube law, or if they remained tiny but their chefs carve bits of wood into miniature replicas of full-sized logs, as part of a elaborate culinary culture that we’re just getting a glimpse of here.

Pluggers, 2/21/23

Pluggers is, of course, a fundamentally sad text, a ongoing and often quite grim paean to a supposedly bygone set of mores. Today, however, may be the first panel I can remember in which the practice being held up as an object of nostalgic longing is just obviously, demonstrably worse than what we have now. “Oh, can you kids today block that creepy guy you work with on Instagram so he doesn’t post borderline sexual comments on every one of your selfies, and also complain to HR about him? In my day, if I didn’t want to know he was jerking off, I would have to just leave my phone off the hook so that he couldn’t call me and nobody could either, and also quit my job!”

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 2/10/23

Huh, so I guess while Coach Martinez reigns supreme in football, in basketball he must answer to “Coach Kim,” who I assume his delivering his line here with gutting, icy disdain. The coaching hierarchy remains mysterious! Not exactly sure how Luke’s Thorbsession has led to today’s disastrous Valley Tech performance, though. Maybe the team had set aside one practice to master “not throwing the ball to the other team” but Luke never showed up because he was busy powerflexing in the mirror or something.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/10/23

Look, man, I don’t claim to know everything about the gender politics of Hootin’ Holler, but I feel like I’ve spent more time thinking about the worldbuilding of this strip generally than just about anyone else, and I’m confident in saying that the menfolk do not let their wives tag along on fishing trips. The whole point of the fishing trip is to create segregated homosocial spaces, and also avoid being nagged about not having a job. I refute this!

Pluggers, 2/10/23

I stared at this a long time wondering if pluggers think a turtleneck is like a backwards shirt, but I think the joke is just that pluggers’ necks are bigger now than they were 40+ years ago — or, in the case of the plugger on display here, that they now simply have no neck at all.

Post Content

The Lockhorns, 2/6/23

A thing I like about The Lockhorns is that it’s a comic about a marriage that has spiraled into truly dark territory, but most of the individual strips aren’t necessarily about incandescent moments of hate. Instead, you just get a series of small disappointments that add up to a wasted life. Like, today, you have to imagine that Loretta got it into her head that they should be a tea family, or at least that they should try it out, and she went through the trouble of putting together a matching tea set, and now, on morning one, Leroy just stares dully into his cup and is like “enh, let’s not.” Devastating. Devastating! And the most devastating thing is that they can still devastate one another like this, without even thinking about it.

Slylock Fox, 2/6/23

I feel like Weirdly has honestly put more work into his alibi here than he usually does. “Who, me?” he says. “I just got back from bowling. Haven’t even bothered to put my ball away yet, and my phone still hasn’t fully recharged. I was just sitting down to get on the computer and hadn’t even had time to enter my password!” The boiling flask isn’t that suspicious to me, it’s not like Weirdly has ever given the vibe of being really concerned about safety so he could’ve just left it boiling while he was out, or left one of his menagerie in charge of it, like the purple thing or the [record scratch] WAIT HOLD ON A SECOND COURT WEIRDLY HAS A MAX-ANALOGUE SIDEKICK? With the same color/dress scheme except he’s like … a tiny canid predator of some sort? Is that a small fox, specifically chosen to taunt Slylock? More on this story as it develops.

Pluggers, 2/6/23

It’s hard to get more Pluggers that today’s Pluggers, in which a plugger looks more smug than you can possibly imagine after completing a basic task that used to be something everyone did and now is something that nobody actually needs to do.

Shoe, 2/6/23

It looks like, after literally years of me demanding that Shoe start doing jokes that play off the strip’s basic premise, which is that all the characters are birds, that they finally did one. Honestly, I feel nothing about this. Nothing at all. This should be a big day for me, and yet: nothing. Going to go somewhere quiet where I can contemplate what I’m doing with my life for a bit.