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Shoe, 1/21/24

This is a truly terrible joke and I don’t want to deal with it on any of it’s “humorous” levels but I think we should pause to think about the “college roommate” angle. The Perfesser is an extremely despress fifty(?)-something extremely bird-man who can’t maintain a romantic relationship and is doing the bare legal minimum to serve as a guardian for Skyler, the son of a presumably deceased sibling. This joke seems to require a close personal relationship to work and the only one that his creators can come up with for him is with a college roommate, someone he presumably hasn’t spent time with in decades. It’s extremely grim stuff, just like every other time we get the tiniest peek at the personal lives of any of the bird-people in this strip.

Gasoline Alley, 1/21/24

Hey guys, remember the Magic Eye books, from the ’90s? They were everywhere for a little bit and I was always bitter about it because I’m nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other and have terrible stereo vision as a result, so they never worked for me and I came to resent their popularity since it felt like they were mocking me personally. Anyway, that fad ended and I haven’t had to think about them for decades but now, uh, here’s today’s Gasoline Alley, I guess. Is this even going to work as a Magic Eye thing? Just a bunch of heads in a row? Anyone whose eyes work properly, please give it a shot and report back, though I won’t think less of you if you don’t, since I would not attempt to see these withered freaks in 3D even if I were physically capable of it.

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Shoe, 1/19/24

I was going to go on a long rant here about how comics gag writers so frequently come up with a joke and then work backwards from it even if it doesn’t make sense in the strip’s established universe of characters, and why would the Perfesser be interested in a cruise like this when he doesn’t even have kids, but then, ha ha, I realized I had forgotten about his nephew-ward Skyler. In my defense, I think the Perfesser also forgets about his nephew-ward Skyler on the regular. Anyway, there’s absolutely no chance he’s going to take this child on a cruise with him. He won’t even buy a second piece of living room furniture so they can eat in front of the TV together.

Hi and Lois, 1/19/24

I feel like I come across on this blog as some kind of hardass for comedic structure but I’m really not! Take this Hi and Lois, for instance: I honestly enjoyed it even though it contains literally nothing that you could call a “joke” per se. Hi’s contorted body language on the coach is great, but the punctuation mark-less “AAAEEUGH” is what really seals the deal for me. Sometimes comics can just be vibes and that’s OK!

Mary Worth, 1/19/24

“Used to be you could just skip town and move to California and change your name to an obviously fake one and that was that! Nobody would blink an eye! You could start over! Then came Mr. Science sticking his nose in where it didn’t belong. And that’s when you have to start poisoning people with muffins.”

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Hi and Lois, 1/10/23

You know and I know that Trixie Flagston has been doing her thing (“her thing” being sitting unattended on the floor for hours at a time and fixating on the shafts of light coming in from the outside in the absence of any other meaningful stimulus) since 1954, but I suppose we must concede that, in the world of the strip, Trixie is a literal baby and has only been doing it for a few months. Like maybe this is her first winter? Maybe this is the first she’s seen the moon? Anyway, watch out, Sunbeam, looks like Trixie has a new friend! You’d be upset, if you were the jealous type, and if your existence as a being with feelings and desires was anything other than a product of Trixie’s sad, lonely imagination.

Shoe, 1/10/23

Say what you will about Shoe, but its creator Jeff MacNelly was a real old-school newspaperman, and you can tell that’s built into its DNA by how accurate its depiction of most working journalists are (they’re all very depressed and hate the act of writing with their whole heart).

The Lockhorns, 1/10/23

Seems kind of obvious, Loretta. It’s so he doesn’t have to wash them! Glad I could help.