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Mary Worth, 3/1/23

Uh oh! Looks like Estelle is running into the dark side of dating a hot, animal-saving, ivory-tinkling hunk like Dr. Ed: he has other obligations, like to the animals he has to save, or the ivories he has to tinkle, or whatever. Hey, Estelle, you know who won’t stand you up on a date? Wilbur! He’ll always be there for you, even if you don’t want him to be! Sorry, those are your only two choices, I guess!

Crock, 3/1/23

Every classic comic strip needs to have a longtime married couple who hates each other to remind readers that heterosexual monogamy is a crushing prison, and in Crock that couple is Grossie and Maggot. Usually they just hate each other in a “fun” way, like with quips and such, but their facial expressions in today’s panel let us know that every moment of their existence, in which they’re forced to remain together forever in a strip that will keep going out in reruns indefinitely, is an agonizing one.

Shoe, 3/1/23

Every once in a while I need to remind you, my faithful readers, about the ways in which I suffer for your entertainment and my craft, so I’m going to tell you that my very first instinct upon reading today’s Shoe was to do some online research on whether cloacas have sphincters that allow birds to hold in their poops or if they just have to let it go as soon as it’s ready. Anyway, the material I found was very gross, and the answer is that they can hold it in but not for anywhere near as long as mammals without risking injury so they generally don’t, so yes, Shoe is being literal here, the staff of the Treetops Tribune just let it rip around the office wherever and whenever they need to.

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Slylock Fox, 2/25/23

I have sadly accepted that we Slylock readers can never see past the horizon of whatever Event separates our human world from Slylock’s animal-ruled kingdom, but every once in a while we get a glimpse of a time quite close to it. Take today’s strip, for example. Now, this isn’t in the first heady post-revolutionary days, when statues of human heroes were torn down in spontaneous displays of victorious rage in front of cheering animal crowds. No, this is from the ensuing weeks or months, when those lesser H. sapiens culture heroes were methodically wiped from public spaces by the employees of the new regime. To these two dogs, the work has almost become routine at this point, but you have to imagine it was still satisfying.

Blondie, 2/25/23

OK, so … does Dagwood, and/or anyone involved in the production of the venerable syndicated newspaper comic strip Blondie, know what “an offer he can’t refuse” means in The Godfather, the movie this classic line is from? It means you get someone to do what you want by threatening them with physical violence. In the movie, Don Corleone strongarms a Hollywood proudcer to cast his godson in a movie by cutting off his beloved horse’s head and putting it in the producer’s bed. So, in this scenario, Dagwood is upset that this car salesman isn’t going to use Daisy’s brutal murder and mutilation to convince him that he has no choice but to buy a BMW M8 coupe for considerably more than its $134,000 MSRP, I guess? I know Dagwood only watches westerns, but I feel like someone needs to tell him he’s treading into dangerous territory here.

Shoe and Zits, 2/25/23

Are taxes the mechanism by which a democratic society pools its wealth in order to provide public services? Or are they a literal crime imposed on sovereign citizens by tyrants? Today’s comics are here to bring you both sides of the story!

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The Lockhorns, 2/6/23

A thing I like about The Lockhorns is that it’s a comic about a marriage that has spiraled into truly dark territory, but most of the individual strips aren’t necessarily about incandescent moments of hate. Instead, you just get a series of small disappointments that add up to a wasted life. Like, today, you have to imagine that Loretta got it into her head that they should be a tea family, or at least that they should try it out, and she went through the trouble of putting together a matching tea set, and now, on morning one, Leroy just stares dully into his cup and is like “enh, let’s not.” Devastating. Devastating! And the most devastating thing is that they can still devastate one another like this, without even thinking about it.

Slylock Fox, 2/6/23

I feel like Weirdly has honestly put more work into his alibi here than he usually does. “Who, me?” he says. “I just got back from bowling. Haven’t even bothered to put my ball away yet, and my phone still hasn’t fully recharged. I was just sitting down to get on the computer and hadn’t even had time to enter my password!” The boiling flask isn’t that suspicious to me, it’s not like Weirdly has ever given the vibe of being really concerned about safety so he could’ve just left it boiling while he was out, or left one of his menagerie in charge of it, like the purple thing or the [record scratch] WAIT HOLD ON A SECOND COURT WEIRDLY HAS A MAX-ANALOGUE SIDEKICK? With the same color/dress scheme except he’s like … a tiny canid predator of some sort? Is that a small fox, specifically chosen to taunt Slylock? More on this story as it develops.

Pluggers, 2/6/23

It’s hard to get more Pluggers that today’s Pluggers, in which a plugger looks more smug than you can possibly imagine after completing a basic task that used to be something everyone did and now is something that nobody actually needs to do.

Shoe, 2/6/23

It looks like, after literally years of me demanding that Shoe start doing jokes that play off the strip’s basic premise, which is that all the characters are birds, that they finally did one. Honestly, I feel nothing about this. Nothing at all. This should be a big day for me, and yet: nothing. Going to go somewhere quiet where I can contemplate what I’m doing with my life for a bit.