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Shoe, 2/1/10

Say what you will about Funky Winkerbean, but at least it’s totally upfront with its non-stop cavalcade of misery. Some strips hide a core of intense gloom that occasionally peeks out from underneath the cheery front end of a gag-a-day strip. Take today’s Shoe, for instance. The Perfesser thought-balloons that “mama said there’d be days like this” as his morning alarm goes off. In other words, he’s already written the day off as terrible in his first few seconds of wakefulness. “Oh, look, I didn’t die painlessly in my sleep. Yep, it looks like it’s gonna be one of those days!”

It’s also possible that the alarm has been going off for hours now, and the Perfesser is simply unable to move close enough to the clock to turn it off, due to some combination of obesity and decrepitude.

Gil Thorp, 2/1/10

Like many an angry, aimless dropout of his generation, Steve Luhm uses sarcasm to get in little digs at his elders that they’re too irony-deficient to catch. “My dad taught me there’s honor in any job if you work at hard at it … even coaching! And you know what’s a good sign that someone’s a hard worker? When they just hand off part of their workload to some other random person at the first opportunity! Anyway, I’ll be sure to thank my dad for that pearl of wisdom.”

Judge Parker, 2/1/10

Speaking of sarcasm, the Judge Parker narration box’s is particularly transparent today. At breakfast, Sam is still talking about Neddy’s live-in boyfriend! Still! The guy just will not shut up about it! Come on, dude, move on into the 21st century with the rest of us, OK?

Curtis, 2/1/10

I admit to being charmed by the enormous unblinking eye on Michelle’s t-shirt today. Curtis’s romantic ardor must be intense indeed, as it would instill a major case of the heebie-jeebies in the soul of a lesser suitor.

Luann, 2/1/10

Wait, they wish they had more time together? Every time we see them in this God-damned strip, they’re endless hashing out the terms of their perfectly gross relationship. Admittedly, each panel featuring Brand and/or Toni is one that doesn’t feature Luann and/or Gunther, but one shouldn’t have to settle for the lesser evil. Why not just retool the strip around Knute, Puddles the dog, Shannon, and Mr. Fogarty, and do everyone a favor?

Mary Worth, 2/1/10

Dear young people everywhere: do not ask either of your parents why he or she cannot forget a past lover unless you want to hear things about his or her past sexytimes that will shake you to your core. Fortunately, Wilbur is such a negative nelly that he goes straight to the arguments while meaningfully adjusting his glasses, though this may only presage tomorrow’s vivid recounting of the mind-blowing post-argument make-up sex. The description will blow Dawn’s socks off, assuming that purple bands of gauze wrapped around the middle of one’s feet can be said to constitute “socks.”

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Shoe, 11/23/09

It is not often that I offer unironic congratulations to the writers of any comic, let alone to those of Shoe, but: Unironic congratulations, writers of Shoe, for slipping what seems to me to be a fairly transparent premature ejaculation joke past the censors at Cassatt and Brookins, Inc. I guess you could just bat your eyes innocently and say, “Oh, no, that’s just the length of their relationship!” but, uh, yeah. And the joke would have maybe worked better if she had said “six and a half feet,” though would anyone actually say that in idiomatic English? Also: six and half foot tall prematurely ejaculating bird, yeesh. But still, a comics coup!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/23/09

Speaking of coups, I’m pretty unsettled by the sheer quantity of ammunition that Snuffy is stockpiling in his rickety rural shack. Apparently he’s tired of just killing muskrat for stew and firing warning shots over the head of the occasional revenuer, and has decided to launch a full-on armed assault on Sheriff Tait, who as near as I can tell is the only legally sanctioned authority figure resident in Hootin’ Holler. If Lukey’s head-shakin’, tongue-wagglin’ approval is any indication, he assumes he’ll have a privileged position in Snuffy’s New Order, though of course one can never really trust the word of an unstable military dictator.

Gil Thorp, 11/23/09

Tightly wound rage case Duncan Daley has been working hard at being good because of some inspirational blah blah his brother tried to hand him before he went to prison, but now that his brother is starting prison fights, Duncan has decided that being good is for suckers. His disconcerting facial expression in panel three — the tight little smile, the faraway eyes — promises that he’s going “celebrate” with grim, fanatical intensity, possibly leaving a trail of bodies in his wake.

Crock, 11/23/09

OH OH WAIT EXCEPT WE LIVE IN THE SAHARA FUCKING DESERT

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Shoe, 11/14/09

I’m on the record as considering Buzz, the cantankerous be-hatted coot here, to be Shoe’s most likable character, mostly due to his hilarious combination of senility and aggression. Naturally, I was unsettled to see Roz lecturing him on finishing his food as if he were a child. I was particularly unsettled to see that either (a) Roz has fed him a meal infested with vermin or (b) the massive amounts of prescription medication coursing through his veins are causing him to hallucinate.

Family Circus, 11/14/09

Is Billy really the one to explain to his mother the intricacies of the game? As we can see by his inky black pennant, he appears to be rooting for Evil — in the form of enmity between the two teams or fan bases, or perhaps even in the form of the players’ permanent physical harm — to prevail, no matter which team comes out ahead in the mundane matter of scoring points. At least his appreciation of the spectacle will probably be more sophisticated than Jeffy’s, since the younger Keane boy appears to be cheering for football as an abstract concept, or perhaps for the success of the actual, physical football.

Mary Worth, 11/14/09

“I know that adversity may come our way! That’s why I swear that I will punch each and every obstacle that appears in the path of our glorious love. I will punch them right in the face!”