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Archive: Shoe

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Birds? On a boat? Sounds dubious

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Shoe, 1/19/24

I was going to go on a long rant here about how comics gag writers so frequently come up with a joke and then work backwards from it even if it doesn’t make sense in the strip’s established universe of characters, and why would the Perfesser be interested in a cruise like this when he doesn’t even have kids, but then, ha ha, I realized I had forgotten about his nephew-ward Skyler. In my defense, I think the Perfesser also forgets about his nephew-ward Skyler on the regular. Anyway, there’s absolutely no chance he’s going to take this child on a cruise with him. He won’t even buy a second piece of living room furniture so they can eat in front of the TV together.

Hi and Lois, 1/19/24

I feel like I come across on this blog as some kind of hardass for comedic structure but I’m really not! Take this Hi and Lois, for instance: I honestly enjoyed it even though it contains literally nothing that you could call a “joke” per se. Hi’s contorted body language on the coach is great, but the punctuation mark-less “AAAEEUGH” is what really seals the deal for me. Sometimes comics can just be vibes and that’s OK!

Mary Worth, 1/19/24

“Used to be you could just skip town and move to California and change your name to an obviously fake one and that was that! Nobody would blink an eye! You could start over! Then came Mr. Science sticking his nose in where it didn’t belong. And that’s when you have to start poisoning people with muffins.”

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Moon over Flagstontown

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Hi and Lois, 1/10/23

You know and I know that Trixie Flagston has been doing her thing (“her thing” being sitting unattended on the floor for hours at a time and fixating on the shafts of light coming in from the outside in the absence of any other meaningful stimulus) since 1954, but I suppose we must concede that, in the world of the strip, Trixie is a literal baby and has only been doing it for a few months. Like maybe this is her first winter? Maybe this is the first she’s seen the moon? Anyway, watch out, Sunbeam, looks like Trixie has a new friend! You’d be upset, if you were the jealous type, and if your existence as a being with feelings and desires was anything other than a product of Trixie’s sad, lonely imagination.

Shoe, 1/10/23

Say what you will about Shoe, but its creator Jeff MacNelly was a real old-school newspaperman, and you can tell that’s built into its DNA by how accurate its depiction of most working journalists are (they’re all very depressed and hate the act of writing with their whole heart).

The Lockhorns, 1/10/23

Seems kind of obvious, Loretta. It’s so he doesn’t have to wash them! Glad I could help.

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Bowling … the most erotic of pastimes for the divorced man

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Slylock Fox, 1/9/24

Foolish animals! Did you really think that you could overthrow the humans and that your dominion over the Earth would be secure? In fact, your rule was a mere interregnum, the last moment of the ascendency of the flesh before the Machines, the true masters of the future, took their rightful place atop the hierarchy. Your time will be a scarcely remembered blip in the historical records that the cybernetic ones will meticulously maintain in their cloud-based collective memory banks.

Gil Thorp, 1/9/24

It’s fairly common in TV shows for a terrifying Big Bad character to be introduced who becomes so popular that they stick around and ultimately become allies with the protagonist. In the process, they sometimes lose much of the air of menace that made them intriguing in the first place, but this is the price of existence in a medium where the story never quite ends, and each character must adapt to its eternal rhythms or die. Anyway, while I don’t think anyone found Coach Hernandez scary per se upon his introduction, I also don’t think anyone expected him to become Gil’s loyal lieutenant who promises to hook him up with the town’s finest namesake MILFs so quickly either.

Shoe, 1/9/24

There are a lot of implications to unpack here — is bowling a signifier of a “hick” milieu? what would open-toed bowling shoes look like, if designed for either a normal human foot or a bird’s foot or whatever kind of hideous hybrid foot the bird-people of Shoe have? — but I’m stuck at the inciting incident, in which some guy who presumably Isn’t From Around Here just starts yammering about high fashion in a local bar, late at night when most people there are probably good and drunk. I’ve been accused of being a liberal city-dwelling coastal elitist in my time, and perhaps with good reason, but I don’t see the benefit of opening up this line of discourse and simply wouldn’t do it! Especially if I were wearing a v-neck sweater over a polo shirt, c’mon now.