Post Content

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.

Post Content

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.

Post Content

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!