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Shoe, 3/22/22

A few years ago during a big family Thanksgiving gathering, I looked up to see my seventysomething mother and her siblings sitting on the couch all fiddling with their phones, and I posted a picture of it with the caption “Darn those millennials!” or something like that. I did this not to be mean to them — I too had been fiddling with my phone just minutes earlier despite being in a room full of family that I hadn’t seen in months — but to make the point that our gadgets are inherently addictive and people of all ages find it hard to tear ourselves away from them. I genuinely appreciate that today’s Shoe features two late-middle-aged bird men sitting at a diner counter looking at their phones, a scene (other than the bird part) that would be utterly unremarkable in real life but which most fiction has failed to keep up with. I especially appreciate it because presumably the main audience for Shoe is older and maybe prone to thinking of gadget love as an affliction of the young. Is the way to break these diabolical machines’ grip to remind people that they could be having sex instead of staring at their phone? I’m not convinced, but I’m glad Shoe is giving this messaging strategy a try.

Crankshaft, 3/22/22

Sure, it’s taken a generation or two, but at least someone in this family knows that the best way to avoid learning truly horrible things or hearing terrible puns is to just talk to other people as little as possible. Max and Mindy could be completely free of this nonsense by just moving out of their parents’ house entirely, but this will do in a pinch.

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Shoe, 3/11/22

We’re all of course, familiar with Shoe’s patented goggle-eyes of horror and heavy-lidded eyes of ennui. But today we have what I think is a new one: the heavy-lidded eyes of horniness. See the Perfesser in panel two? That, my friend, is the face of a bird-man who’s about to go jerk off to some pictures cut out of pornographic magazines by the Czech scam artists who are catfishing him by mail, and it’s going to be the high point of his week.

Funky Winkerbean, 3/11/22

Speaking of masturbation, I guess I was wrong, Marianne is going to acknowledge Lisa, and in fact is about to announce that Lisa should’ve won this Oscar. She wasn’t an actress, of course, but she did die of cancer, which is the greatest performance of all, if you think about it.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/11/22

Ha ha, these kids don’t understand the basic concepts of music! In a related question, how do you think the noises they’re making on those instruments sound? I’m guessing pretty bad!

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Family Circus, 3/9/21

In the interests of fairness and integrity, I will always admit it when a day’s Family Circus is one of the good ones, and folks … today is one of those days. My favorite thing here is the way that Billy is resting his arm on the couch; I suppose the intention is that he’s indicating the couch on which he’s offering to sleep, but I’d like to think that he’s actually so stunned by this bowl of candy, just left out there at a grabbing height, where anyone can get at it, that he’s staggered backwards and needs to hold himself up. If he can just maintain his composure until everyone goes to sleep, he can shove all of that candy down his gullet and then spend the night staring at the ceiling in the grips of the most delightful sugar mania.

Daddy Daze, 3/9/21

This Daddy Daze is also pretty good, to be honest. I’m still not convinced one way or the other on whether or not the Daddy Daze baby’s “ba”s represent real linguistic content, but that’s irrelevant to the fact that the Daddy Daze daddy has lost steam halfway through the process of putting on his shirt and is now just standing there with it covering his face, contemplating the fact that all of us are really just 100 pounds or so of rotting meat hanging off of our skeletons.

Dennis the Menace, 3/9/21

The best thing about this Dennis the Menace is that dinner at the Mitchell house tonight is that lumpy brown slurry that’s a comics visual shorthand for “Haw haw, wives/moms sure can’t cook, amiright fellas?” Not sure what Alice has added to it in order to make it palatable to her son this time — tons of sugar, or maybe alcohol?

Shoe, 3/9/21

“Look, I’m dying. I know I’m dying! I just don’t want to hear about it every time I go get the prescription for my boner pills renewed.”