Post Content

Crock, 1/22/20

One of the dangers of doing a syndicated comic strip for years is that you either subconsciously repeat a joke or just submit a strip you drew years ago hoping your editors won’t notice; and one of the dangers of writing a blog making fun of comic strips for (gulp) 15-plus years is that I’ll see one of these repeats and make more or less the same joke about it that I did long before. Sometimes I miss it, but sometimes as I’m about to hit “publish” a little voice nags at me that it all seems too familiar. So it was today, when I had a joke about how the characters in Crock aren’t in North Africa at all, but rather are parasites who reside on the flesh of some unimaginably huge creature; but then I got that aforementioned nagging feeling, and went walking through my archives, and sure enough, back in 2007, when the creator of the strip was still alive, I made basically this joke about an an entirely different strip that made basically this joke. Anyway! More proof that the Crock characters are all inhabitants of some awful living planet made of meat, or something! This is Crockiverse canon, and you have to think about it every time you read the strip!

Shoe, 1/22/20

Shoe, meanwhile, is relatively “with it” for a long-running legacy strip today: The Wiz is, after all, an expert in all things computers, and it would be unrealistic for him to try to convince Shoe that there’s any viable revenue model for online journalism.

Dustin, 1/22/20

You know, if you’re going to do a strip about a middle-aged character picking up some youth slang, it might behoove you to be really, really sure you know what said youth slang means, since “ghosting” refers not to dropping a text conversation with outstanding matters still unresolved, which is what from context the Dustin clan seems to be talking about here, but rather ending a romantic relationship with someone by wholly and abruptly cutting off communication with them. Granted, what with how the rest of them treat Dustin, it’d be fully believable that he’d finally get fed up and ghost them in the correct sense of the word!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/22/20

“Can’t people just die of old age anymore without having to make a big production out if it? I mean, come on.”

Post Content

Shoe, 1/5/20

I’m not sure what, exactly, this strip implies about the world in which Shoe takes place. Do the characters live in a parallel bird-dimension whose history echoes ours in many ways, with bird-Nixon and bird-Coolidge occupying at various points in the 20th century this universe’s equivalent of the White House, which I assume is perched precariously in a tree? Or are we meant to understand that the birds have been watching us for decades, with intellects intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, noting the coming and going of our human leaders, waiting for the right time to strike, to wipe us all out and take our comfy sweaters for their own?

The Phantom, 1/5/20

“See, Heloise, our line of shadowy puppetmasters, who kept native people under their sway via manipulation and fear, and who meticulously maintained their pure European bloodline despite living in Africa for centuries, were actually anti-colonialists. We’re the good guys!”

“Hmm, so why is it that European powers managed to colonize Africa anyway? Did our ancestors collab–”

“DON’T DECIDE YET, HELOISE, LET’S MOVE ON”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/5/20

Ha ha, it’s Aunt Hildy, June’s meddling, troublesome distant relative! What mischief is she getting into today? Why she’s … keeping the kids busy while Rex and June sleep in and helping make breakfast for everyone? Wow, can’t wait to see what kooky antics she gets into next!

Post Content

Shoe, 12/15/19

Ha ha, you know what’s a novel part of modern life? A “drive-thru” window, assuming you consider the 1970s and ’80s, when drive-thru windows became omnipresent on fast food restaurants, to be recent enough that someone might find their existence noteworthy! Anyway, what today’s Shoe asks you to imagine is this: what if there were a mortuary that had a “drive-thru drop-off window,” and while drive-thru windows are usually a means by which you can access an establishment’s goods or services without leaving your car (something already available to funeral customers), the implication of “drive-thru drop-off” seems to be that you’d drive up to the mortuary with a corpse in your car, and just heave it out your window and into the funeral home, then drive off, presumably to have your car’s upholstery cleaned, because of the dead body smell. Pretty funny, huh? Yes, this is definitely the juxtaposition of two discordant ideas for comical effect!

Panel from The Lockhorns, 12/15/19

One would assume that whatever gelatinous off-green mass is on everyone’s plates here is the evening’s main course, so it’s honestly weird that Leroy is only now pulling out this even more inscrutable selection of appetizers. Presumably their preparation was terribly botched even by Loretta’s standards and the decision was not to serve them, but then Leroy fished them out of the trash and stashed them at the ready on the off chance that a wordplay opportunity like this would present itself. Dinner with these two must truly be among the most tiresome things anyone could imagine.

Marvin, 12/15/19

I revisit the concept of comic book time, in which characters always exist in more or less the current calendar year but never age, a lot on this site, but today’s Marvin in some ways reverses it. Usually I imagine characters like Hi and Lois’s Trixie frozen in time, aware of their eternal infancy but unable to break out of it. But today we learn that for Jenny, Marvin’s birth wasn’t that long ago, and her pre-motherhood life is still recent enough that she can catch up with an old friend from those days without much oddness or awkwardness. Sure, he’s a terrible baby who brought her to tears, but she’s confident that will pass, as he naturally moves on to other stages of life, learning to speak, read, and, of course, use a toilet. Meanwhile, in real life, I’m the one who’s trapped. I’m the one who’s been making jokes about Marvin shitting himself for nearly thirteen years now. The characters in these strips are just scribbles on paper, and the prison of the comics is a prison for me and me alone.