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Rhymes With Orange, 7/12/23

One of my biggest beefs with several of the more popular religious cosmologies is the concept of hell: the idea that anything you could do in a finite lifetime could be worthy of infinite punishment just seems wildly unbalanced to me. (Honestly nothing we do could possibly be good enough to merit infinite reward either, but I have a lot less problem with that because I’m a big softie.) Theological sophisticates will tell you that the real punishment you get in hell is separation from God’s grace, but I’m willing to bet that most people who believe in hell think it consists of very real and very agonizing endless physical torture, which makes the whole thing even more abhorrent to me.

Now, I’m not such a scold that I’m can’t appreciate cartoonish depictions of hell — like, I don’t think you should drop pianos on people from a great height either, but I still enjoy classic Warner Brothers cartoons. Even in those cases, though, I’m always struck by the extent to which gruesome torment is at the core of the joke. Sometimes it’s in iconography that everyone kind of ignores — does anyone really think about why the devil is always depicted holding a pitchfork? it’s not a fun reason! — but sometimes it’s pretty deliberate. In this strip, I love that the slot machines themselves are fiery hot, leaving the poor damned players in agony as they pull the lever over and over again (and, presumably, never win). Do you think they’re kept in place by some mental block that makes them unable to leave the machine, perhaps mirroring a vice they were guilty of in life? Or are there just some chains or something at their feet that we can’t see, due to all the flames that are eternally burning their flesh?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/12/23

The bad news is that Sheriff Tait, the only law enforcement officer in the community of Hootin’ Holler, died from massive blood loss and organ damage after being mauled by a vicious bear. The good news is that this saved him from an even worse fate: dying slowly and terribly from the rabies that he contracted from a bat who bit him just moments before the bear caught up with him.

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Six Chix, 4/22/23

I feel like there are few more depressing sentences in the English language than “cake is biodegradable,” which implies that these people aren’t going to eat this delicious cake but are rather just going to leave it out in this open field to slowly rot. These are (I think?) children and the cake is almost as big as they are, so it’s unrealistic to expect them to eat all of it, but still, it’s quite melancholy. I suppose it’s supposed to be the Earth Day equivalent of that time a British train museum tossed a chocolate cake into a locomotive’s firebox for its 145th birthday, but like, a lot less fun.

Rhymes With Orange, 4/22/23

A lot of strips did Earth Day jokes today, and I spent quite a while trying to figure out if this was one of them, but I don’t think it was! I think it’s just a strip asking us to contemplate whether a bird cleaning the food out of a crocodile’s teeth is an erotic experience, for either party.

Mary Worth, 4/22/23

If you were at a karaoke studio and a visibly angry man got on stage and announced “This song is dedicated to me … because I need to hear this!”, how excited would you be for what was about to happen, on a scale from 10 to some kind of number that’s so large that only our most powerful computers could even generate it?

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Six Chix, 11/24/22

If I know my commentors, if I did a post that was just like “what the fuck is this comic about,” a critical mass of you would say “Josh, the ‘pope’s nose’ is the fleshy bit on the butt of a turkey that the tail-feathers grow out of [Google Image Search; TRIGGER WARNING: photos of fleshy turkey bits], everyone normal knows this and the fact that you don’t proves you’re a coast elitist and/or an idiot.” Nevertheless I feel confident that there is a silent majority of you who will welcome this information, and in fact many of you are grateful for the reassurance that you did not have a stroke while reading this strip.

Gasoline Alley, 11/24/22

I guess we all assumed that Walt would finally, blessedly die as a result of falling off the back of a garbage truck, but I guess in fact he’s going to be murdered by an enormous and very angry turkey who he has unwisely provoked. Whatever works, I say!

Funky Winkerbean, 11/24/22

Oh, OK, it turns out the janitor was sent back in time from the future, presumably to prevent some awful turn of events and keep history on the right path. Considering how much suffering the characters in his orbit have endured, imagine what sort of global cataclysm his actions are holding at bay! Anyway, this is a good explanation of why the Funkyverse timeline has gotten so messed up.

Rhymes With Orange, 11/24/22

So it turns out that turkeys have their own internal system of carceral justice, complete with state-enacted executions, but then all of them can also be killed and eaten by humans at any time, and that’s totally separate from their legal system or moral code. Grim stuff! Enjoy your Thanksgiving dinner, everybody!