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Shoe, 4/28/20

Was Cats a box-office failure? Very much so. In fact, it’s one of the most prominent movie flops in recent memory! So it’s actually a good movie to pick for this joke … or it would be, if the joke weren’t about a dog hating it. C’mon, man! Is the joke about how a dog ID’d Cats as a financial failure because he’s a bomb-sniffing dog, or is it about a movie-reviewing dog who hated the movie Cats because he’s a dog who, like all stereotypical dogs, hates cats? YOUR JOKE IS OVERLOADED WITH SIGNIFIERS, damn it!

Crock, 4/28/20

This is comic written by someone who’s heard of books, and seen people on TV interacting with and talking about them, but has never actually read one.

The Lockhorns, 4/28/20

Pretty sure Leroy’s dying? Let’s be honest: it’s a blessing, for everyone concerned.

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Shoe, 1/25/20

I’m having a hard time figuring out if Shoe doing a joke about plagiarism that rips off another widely circulated joke is ironic on purpose or ironic accidentally.

Mark Trail, 1/25/20

OH NO MARK TRAIL IS FINALLY GOING TO LEARN WHAT “SEX” IS

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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.”