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Archive: Shoe

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You know who still hasn’t seen a therapist for his own grief and anger issues? Saul

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Mary Worth, 2/11/21

Oh, say, what’s going on in the Mary Worth domestic violence storyline, which will surely get the same nuanced, realistic treatment that the sexual assault storyline received? Well it turns out that Eve’s abusive ex-husband had a comical vaudeville villain mustache, and also he died, and then she left town with the money she inherited from him and bought a nice condo in Santa Royale. But the importan question: is she moving on emotionally with the help of a licensed professional therapist? Turns out that yes, yes she is. Well, problem solved, time for the next storyline, I guess!

Shoe, 2/11/21

Props to Shoe for long ago figuring out that the format of an open-ended question on a school test is a good opportunity to wedge old jokes into their strip, but I really have question the quality of education that Skyler is receiving. Maybe he knows these one-liners are utterly failing to prepare him for the modern workforce, and that’s why he looks so depressed all the time.

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Sadsexy man-animals

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Shoe, 2/3/21

The “punchline” here isn’t a new joke; I’m reasonably sure I said this more than a decade ago about Michael Phelps, who owned the pool where I swam in Baltimore and who I therefore saw in the locker room multiple times, and I certainly didn’t make it up. In fact, I’d argue it’s barely a joke at all, more just a funny turn of phrase, really. But I do appreciate that they’ve given this cliche that special Shoe twist, which is to say they’ve put it in the context of one of the main characters’ devastatingly depressing personal lives. “I’m tellin’ ya, Shoe, he had muscles in places I don’t even have places! No wonder she left me. I hate my body and myself.”

Pluggers, 2/3/21

Pluggers, like all comic strips, must evolve to survive, and it could go in any number of ways. But I think I speak for all of us when I say that I sincerely did not want or expect it to go with [late middle-aged dog-man doing a sexy baby voice] “Hey, it’s a shiny quarter. Oopsie, did my pants fall down again?”

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If Kelly is going to get into more trouble, I will definitely not complain

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/28/21

Rex Morgan’s Kelly, the teen daughter of the Morgans’ receptionist, has been a particularly acute victim of comic-book time in the strip: she’s gone from a midriff-baring, mom-sassing punk-dating rebel to a chunky-sweater-wearing good girl without having gotten appreciably older in the process. Admittedly, getting blackmailed by a toddler who spotted you fooling around with your boyfriend is the sort of thing that might put you on the straight and narrow! Still, it’s sad that Kelly’s total transformation isn’t good enough for her mom, who apparently will be sending her to a nunnery in short order.

Shoe, 1/28/21

I know that one of Shoe’s go-to bits is Shoe or the Perfesser, who eat at Roz’s literally every day, telling some unsuspecting stranger that the food there sucks, actually. Still, I feel like the items on the menu whose names already include a joke about how they’re hazardous to your health should be exempt from this. You’re overloading the concept! Is it dangerously rich and delicious, or prepared in a dangerously slapdash manner that violates various health and safety codes? The hapless bird-man who has unwittingly wandered into the crossfire of the long-running passive-aggressive Shoe-Roz conflict looks baffled, and rightly so.