Post Content

Crock, 6/9/24

Crock is a strip in perpetual reruns for obvious reasons, and today’s (“today’s”) strip is a delightful puzzle to try to figure out when exactly it was published. Honestly the list presented of things we’d all prefer to be shot to avoid is a testament to the long human lifespan, littered as it is with complaints both contemporary (Facebook) and outdated (boomboxes). If I had to guess, I’d peg this around 2009 or so, as social media started becoming unavoidable, the financial crisis had cratered many people’s IRAs, and health care and global warming were both issues the new presidential administration seemed poised to tackle. Old age, of course, will never go away as an object of fear and driver of those who would seek a more exciting death, but honestly trying to map all this out has only made it seem closer for me.

Six Chix, 6/9/24

OK, look, I know enough about modern mating rituals to know they happen on the apps, but as a happily monogamous married person, I don’t know much more than that. Do people use … hashtags, on the apps? Hashtags, the thing famously developed to make it easier to search on specific terms? Are people on the apps out there searching on “#annielikestocuddle”? People who want to cuddle, with other people named Annie, specifically?

Shoe, 6/9/24

Honestly rude of the Perfesser to blame the slovenly state of his home on his barely tolerated nephew/ward, when it’s quite clear that the mess is mostly his own doing. Very sad that, by design, the poor boy will keep getting the message that he’s an unwanted imposition right down to his uncle’s final moments.

Post Content

Panel from Slylock Fox, 5/19/24

Now, you all know that I am a fan of Reeky Rat trailer park disputes and have been for a very long time, but it’s still nice to see that the strip is mixing things up a little, like giving us the perspective of the Reeky Drama Cam Drone Sly has parked over Chez Rat 24/7 now. Anyway, do you really doubt his alibi that much? Does Reeky look like a guy who microwaves a can of soup, sees that the only clean pieces of silverware he has are forks, and then goes through the trouble of cleaning a spoon? You know you can just pick that bowl up and drink out of it, right, the edge of the fork works just as well as a spoon for scraping the last bits out.

Shoe, 5/19/24

“Oh, you’re talking about the afterlife. We’re birds, Padre! We don’t have souls! Sorry you spent your life in service to the God of Humanity, but trust me when I say that He doesn’t care about you. That bit about the sparrow is a metaphor.”

Post Content

Shoe, 5/7/24

A classic Shoe bit is to use the structure of a test question at Skyler’s school to deliver a bad joke, even though the result is a test question no teacher, no matter how outlandish their pedagogy, would ever write. Anyway, I appreciate that today’s strip is mixing it up by changing the bad joke delivery mechanism to a pub trivia event, which is a fun and exciting new concept, if you’re a Shoe reader. I love that Roz hasn’t bothered to actually hire a trivia host and is just kind of reading questions off her phone. She’s not really trying very hard, so why should this guy actually try to come up with the right answer, when he could just deliver a gag calculated to delight 80-year-olds everywhere?

Judge Parker, 5/7/24

Remember “Declan”? I barely do, having mentioned him on this blog exactly once, and while a wine-drunk Abbey hinted during that appearance that maybe someday he and Neddie would get married, apparently Sophie is less enthused. I’m excited that this might be how we get back cold, calculating Sophie, who’s crunched the numbers and determined that Neddie and Declan have not put in enough love-hours to adequately establish a pair-bond worthy of being validated by the state government.