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Shoe, 10/11/22

If you want a sense of how very old the actual imagined target readership of the newspaper comics is, consider today’s Shoe, which uses as the basis for its punchline the pop cultural touchstone of men belonging to fraternal orders with silly, overelaborate rituals and leadership titles. This is not even something that was really part of the Baby Boom generation’s experience; it’s something that Baby Boomers half-remember their parents arguing about, probably. It’s something that I, a 48-year-old man, mostly know about from watching decades-old reruns of The Flintstones as a child. And yet here it is, a joke in the newspaper and on God’s own internet that makes exactly zero sense if you aren’t familiar with these entirely moribund organizations. Definitely a sign of a healthy art form!

Gasoline Alley, 10/11/22

Not sure what I’m more surprised by: that Walt never considered that his proposed activities might be physically dangerous, or that the prospect of death finally coming for him still engenders anxiety, rather than a sense of profound relief.

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Judge Parker, 9/21/22

Oh, sorry, it seems the Judge Parker brain trust has heard your little diatribes about how Judge Parker is boring now because it’s all about its characters processing their mundane emotions in baffling and erratic ways. Well, that’s why we’re abruptly shifting gears and bringing back Steve the wounded special forces warrior to introduce this hard-hitting new storyline about the judge that replaced Judge Randy Parker, who cracked down on meth and fentanyl traffic … and whose whole family just got murdered. Or, sorry, assassinated. Assassinated! Will I be cancelled as a soft-on-crime lib if I point out that assassination is a kind of murder?

Funky Winkerbean, 9/21/22

Speaking of murder, I guess the Funky Winkerbean brain trust noticed they hadn’t pulled any grim shit since Bull Bushka drove off a cliff back in 2019. Well, here you go, you ghouls: Darrin and Jessica tracked down a real weirdo who hoards memorabilia from the TV station that employed Jessica’s father, John Darling, including the gun that a guy dressed as a plant used to kill him! Look at how Jessica and her husband are recoiling in shock at the casual way this guy identifies his ghastly trophy! Are you happy now, you sickos? Are you happy???

Curtis, 9/21/22

I appreciate the long game Greg is playing here — making an elaborate show of enjoying Curtis’s favorite music before cruelly lowering the boom in the final panel. I assume, like a master chess player, he anticipated multiple potential third-panel conversational gambits from his son, and had a sick burn in his back pocket for all of them.

Shoe, 9/21/22

Far be it for me to call a comic strip about talking birds who wear (some) clothes “realistic,” but I do think that its portrayal of life at a small-town newspaper has a certain truth to it, in the sense that it depicts a publication run with almost no employees, which almost nobody reads, and the few remaining editors can just use it to pursue their own personal gripes and vendettas as they kill time waiting for a hedge fund to buy them and immediately shut them down.

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Crankshaft, 8/25/22

I love Jeff’s sly little smile in the second panel here. He seems to be saying “Ha ha, the ladies, amiright? Can’t live with ’em (because you’ll die in a fire), can’t live without ’em (because they have the keys to the storage unit).”

Shoe, 8/25/22

I love the Perfesser’s bird-lady date’s exhausted facial expression in the second panel. The dialogue here is “Ha ha, the ladies, amiright? They just love to argue for the sake of hearing an argument!” But her face tells a very different story, which is “Please let me die.”

Mary Worth, 8/25/22

“Do I want to what? No, see that’s exactly the opposite of what was supposed to happen with this … uhh [makes static noises with her mouth] uhhh you’re breaking up Jared, I’m going into a tunnel [static noises continue]”