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Shoe, 6/21/23

Here’s a little free hint for comic strip writers everywhere: if you come up with a line of dialogue and you think, “Well, I can’t top that one,” that means you’ve found your punchline! You should probably think of a setup panel that leads into it, instead of just having one of your other characters say “Well, I can’t top that one” and calling it day.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/21/23

For some reason I think I assumed that Snuffy was a lone wolf chicken thief? But here’s Lukey, cheerfully engaging in poultry larceny with him. And in broad daylight! Please, Lukey, reconsider this life of crime, you have a family! At least I think you do? Clearly I don’t know you as well as I thought.

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 6/18/23

This image is, quite frankly, one of the most horrifying that Slylock Fox has presented me with in all my years of reading and commenting on this strip. I suppose Weirdly imagined that his genetically modified mega-bee would itself be able to use its powerful stinger to attack his enemies and fetch its own honey, but thanks to the square cube law its insectoid anatomy means it can barely move, so it spends its days in a cage in Weirdly’s basement, dragging itself over to bowls of honey that someone else has to steal for it. We don’t have any indication that this bee is sapient like the other animals, and truly it would be a blessing if it weren’t, as an intelligent mega-bee would have nothing to do all day but contemplate the innate wrongness of its own existence.

Shoe, 6/18/23

Speaking of fucked up animal business, imagine if you were a mortician and you came into your showroom one day only to find some old guy in there sticking his head into the coffins, taking big sniffs and making satisfied sounds. I know morticians see a lot of stuff that would haunt us normies but this one would have to unsettle even them. Not sure how both the mortician and the old guy being birds would affect things but I can’t imagine it would help.

Gasoline Alley, 6/18/23

Can you imagine how annoying someone’s on-stage patter must be if you get up and demand that they start playing music while they’re in the middle of an anecdote about how people don’t like their music? Rufus must be even more irritating in person than he comes across on the page.

Panel from The Lockhorns, 6/18/23

I’ve never watched Bridgerton, but through cultural osmosis have learned that much of the first season’s plot revolves around a sexually naive young woman whose husband keeps using the withdrawal method and who slowly comes to understand that this is why she isn’t getting pregnant, which means that, to be blunter, much of the first season’s plot revolves around semen, so it’s fun to rate how unsettling it is to imagine various comics characters having in-depth conversations about it. Jeremy Duncan and his mom? Not great. Crankshaft? Very bad. Leroy and Loretta Lockhorn? Hoo boy.

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Pluggers and Shoe, 6/6/23

How are the various human-animal hybrid monstrosities of the Jeff MacNelly Extended Universe grappling with the concept of the “beer belly”? Well, Pluggers would like you to know that they do not guzzle alcoholic beer like some lout; instead they get all the stimulation they could need from a combination of sugars and starches that every doctor on earth would look at and beg, “Please, rethink this.” Shoe, meanwhile, is confident that its core readership of elderly shut-ins has never been a store that sells novelty t-shirts and are unaware that they can find them online, so they’ll never realize that this is a shamelessly ripped off joke.

Slylock Fox, 6/6/23

Ah, here’s a delightful scene from the closing days of the Animal Revolution, in which one of few remaining human holdouts is cornered in a tent deep in the desert, while a grotesquely enhanced scorpion waits eagerly to sting him to death. However, as the snake-vulture interaction at the right of the panel illustrates, the animals are beginning to turn on one another, which explains why they failed to “finish the job” and Slick Smitty and Count Weirdly remain at large.

Gasoline Alley, 6/6/23

Oh, hey, how’s the tale of Rufus’s head injury going? Well, he’s unconscious and unresponsive, and emergency services are unable to reach him, so, not great, really! Not great at all!