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Shoe, 3/30/22

The thing about Shoe is that the bird-people have varying character designs that involve varying amounts of clothing. Some are fully clothed; some, like Shoe himself, are naked; and others, like the Perfesser, are only naked from the waist down. This is, honestly, fine, because they’re bird-people and it really doesn’t matter how naked they are, but it becomes much worse when you learn the Perfesser used to wear pants but then he got too big for them and instead of buying a different size he just stopped. Can you imagine if people did this? These birds are lucky they’re birds!

Dennis the Menace, 3/30/22

Dennis is the Chosen One of our omnipotent God, and He will support and defend Dennis no matter what, even if his behavior is so beyond the pale that his friends all reject him. Menace level: infinite.

Gasoline Alley, 3/30/22

Trying to think of a response to “Where have you two been” that’s creepier than “In our skin.” “You know, we’ve just been in here with all the blood and organs sloshing around. That’s all we are, really! Just a bunch of meat in a thin wrapper. What’ve you been up to?”

Pluggers, 3/30/22

Not sure if the normally happy go lucky readers of Pluggers are ready for today’s strip, which delivers the tough news that the plugger-wives are now BARREN

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Family Circus, 3/25/22

I very distinctly remember the moment more than four years ago when I read this article about the “raw water” movement in the New York Times because it drove me very nearly to despair. Basically, starting around 150 years ago humanity began to achieve something that would’ve been deemed near-miraculous by any other civilization in history — safe-to-drink water delivered at incredibly low cost to almost every home — and now that we’re a couple generations removed from anyone who remembers what life was like before that, people are instead selling unsterilized spring water for $15 a gallon and saying stuff like “They’re putting in fluoride — call me a conspiracy theorist, but it’s a mind-control drug” to reporters. It’s bad! It’s real bad! On the other hand, if it’s gonna result in Jeffy and Billy getting killed by cholera, I guess I can’t complain too much.

Mary Worth, 3/25/22

Oh my god, this is too good. This is perfect. I love everything happening here. I love Cal dropping “have you tried just not thinking about your problems” like it’s sage advice, and I really love that Helen has busted out binoculars for her Toby-spying needs. I’m assuming Helen isn’t, like, an ornithology professor (because I assume most community colleges don’t have ornithology departments) so she brought those in to work specifically for looking at Toby’s brazen flirtations from afar. Who knows what further madness her obsession with cock-blocking Toby will lead her to! Keep it up, Helen!

Shoe, 3/25/22

The fact that the creative team behind Shoe thinks that “being an artist” is a ticket to financial independence reveals a lot frankly surprising information about how lucrative Shoe is.

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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.