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Beetle Bailey, 10/12/23

I don’t know if General Halftrack’s rambling comeback here is supposed to be funny (it isn’t) or if it’s supposed to indicate that he’s flustered and not very smart so the only comeback he can unleash is this unfunny word salad (which also isn’t funny even in a meta way). Either way, not good. I know that a lot of times I take my “Comics Curmudgeon” mission as a chance to riff on some intellectual or social or artistic theme, but sometimes I just gotta point to a strip and say “You didn’t do so hot today, friend.”

Shoe, 10/12/23

Someday I’m going to be senile and in a home somewhere and will have forgotten the names and faces of everyone I’ve ever loved, but certain bits of terrible knowledge will just be burned into my decaying brain forever. “Birds and other animals with cloacae don’t really have sphincters like mammals and just pee and poop freely all day” is one of those facts that will never leave me, and I’m reasonably sure I learned it while researching a post about Shoe. All these bird-people should be wearing adult diapers, is what I’m saying.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/12/23

I’m not going to say that this long, shaggy-dog Mud apology tour/Mirakle Method storyline would be redeemed if it ends with Truck summarily firing Buck as his agent and taking on this criminal as an agent. But, like, I wouldn’t be mad about it, either.

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Mary Worth, 10/9/23

An opinion I’m coming around to more and more is that it’s kind of silly to expect comics as a medium to be “realistic,” as they have to impart a lot of plot and character details in a very compressed amount of visual/textual narrative space; that’s why it’s genuinely fine for Elmo to be walking around in his full football uniform even though nobody would do that in real life. In this scenario, it’s actually fairly natural for these two characters to be dealing with this confrontation in different ways — Keith trying to work his way back to the moment this story he’s learning about for the first time began, while Sonia tries to fill in a blank space in her family history that she’s lived with her whole life — and the dialogue doesn’t have to be naturalistic, really. But I’m sorry, I will never get over Sonia talking like an unctuous talk show host. “I’m curious… Who is my dad? What makes him tick? How’d he get so beefy? We’ll continue the conversation, right after these messages.”

Dick Tracy, 10/9/23

This Dick Tracy stab maniac plot is taking a detour into tweedy academia and rare book intrigue, which you’d think would be the sort of thing I’d be into but mostly it’s just bringing up a lot of residual grad school trauma. Still, I think it’s worth pointing out that they’re introducing a new villain (?) who’s just blatantly Cate Blanchett. Not sure if this is an effort to turn the strip into Dick Tárcy so that the uninitiated seek out Todd Field’s masterpiece Tár — now available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video, at no additional cost for Prime subscribers — but as a certified Tárhead (that’s like being a jarhead, but for Tár) I heartily endorse the move if so.

Dustin, 10/9/23

Dustin’s dad’s family, his good-paying job, his comfortable suburban life … absolutely none of that inspires in him any emotion other than misery, anger, and dread. The only joy he experiences comes in a short, intense physical burst when binges on something sweet, and even that is incredibly fleeting. I’d feel bad for him, if he weren’t so incredibly unlikeable.

Shoe, 10/9/23

Normally I roll my eyes at overly labored Shoe wordplay, but I have to admit that a cultural history of boomerangs called Comeback would be a huge hit at airport bookstores everywhere, and would get even more buzz once people found out a bird wrote it.

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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.