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Shoe, 9/22/23

Perfesser Cosmo Fishhawk is, according to the (alarmingly detailed) table in the Shoe Wikipedia page, an osprey, and ospreys, according to the (about as detailed as you’d expect) osprey Wikipedia page, sight their prey “when the osprey is 10–40 m (33–131 ft) above the water, after which the bird hovers momentarily and then plunges feet first into the water.” So it seems kind of odd that the Perfesser would be scared to skydive, though I guess he gets most of his sustenance from Roz’s diner and mindlessly eating potato chips in front of the TV, so maybe he’s just really out of practice.

Blondie, 9/22/23

Sometimes Dagwood is portrayed in this strip as a true gourmand, someone who, while not being a food snob by any means, has strong and nuanced opinions about different restaurants, dishes, and cuisines. And other times he’s just portrayed as being an indiscriminate glutton who’ll gobble down whatever’s put in front of him, unable to distinguish the delicious from the disgusting. So you may be wondering: is it a terrible burden, caring more about consistent characterizations in newspaper comic strips than any of the people actually producing them do? And I can tell you that yes, yes it is.

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Shoe, 9/13/23

A comic strip is such a condensed bit of storytelling that I generally think it should do one joke and and do it well. Today’s Shoe, for instance, should just lean into the fact that it’s doing a version of the well-worn “psychic fails to predict something that would actually have been quite helpful for them to know” bit or do something with in the fact that there’s a new psychic in town named “Claire Voyance.” “But Josh,” you’re probably saying, “‘Claire Voyance’ is an incredibly dumb and on-the-nose thing to name a psychic, I’m not sure how you’d squeeze anything funny out of that,” and you’re not wrong, but keep in mind that Shoe’s recurring psychic character, the one who’s featured in today’s strip, is named “Madame ZooDoo” for some reason, so you can see that the strip isn’t operating on a particularly high level to begin with.

The Lockhorns, 9/13/23

Man, I want to know about the chain of thought that led to Loretta hanging up a “Happy Anniversary” sign from Party City for a dinner of leftover orange goo and bright red wine. Normally I’d think this was set up to drop some kind of sick burn on Leroy, but instead it just made her an easy target, so I have to assume she just gave up, which is sad, honestly. You hate to see a great competitor in marital combat leave the arena.

Blondie, 9/13/12

It’s been a while since I watched the Weather Channel, but based on the general trajectory of basic cable channels, I very much would believe that America’s Greatest Weather Injuries is a big part of its lineup now. Gotta give the people what they want!

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Shoe, 9/10/23

I don’t play poker so I don’t know if it’s normal for three friends to be randomly assigned a total stranger as a fourth player for a game in a casino or card room or grim basement illuminated by a single lightbulb where you’re playing on a giant wire spool instead of a table. I do know that if in mid-game, that guy started, in the typical manner of his species, grunting out “Hey, who wants to fuck, huh? Who wants to fuck me. Who’s horny. I’m horny. I’m hornt up”, I for one would find it quite off-putting.

Gasoline Alley, 9/10/23

Speaking of off-putting, I can decide which possibility I find weirder: that we’re expected to believe that random people in the Gasoline Alley universe send letters looking for advice to Joel, a weird old man who does not have a newspaper column or blog or any other public venue in which to answer them, or that we’re expected to believe that people in the real world send letters looking advice to the creators of Gasoline Alley so that they can be answered in character by Joel in a Sunday strip. For the record, I don’t believe either of these things! I simply refuse to! I believe in a world that makes sense, damn it!