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Archive: Shoe

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Move over, cronut: it’s muffookie time

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Mary Worth, 1/27/18

Mary Worth has definitely been setting up the Great Muffin Caper for a while now, with Mary offering up her signature pastry to console the whole Weston clan, both father and daughter, in their times of trouble over the past year. The ones Dawn got last fall were ID’d as carrot muffins, but I’m not sure what the later ones we’ve been seeing are supposed to be, and there may not be a canonical in-universe answer, what with the writer, artist, and colorist all being different people, but they sure look like chocolate chip cookies, right? Which leads to the next obvious question: what if you made something that you called “muffins” but they were actually chocolate chip cookies shaped like muffins? That would be delicious and a differentiating piece of intellectual property that could definitely make you rich, once you’ve successfully farmed out production to a country with low labor costs and a relaxed attitude about what sort of preservatives you can legally put into baked goods.

Shoe, 1/27/18

A cool thing about writing a syndicated comic strip is that you can be momentarily stirred by a vaguely erotic premise that doesn’t really have a punchline to it, and then, bam! 15% of your job for the week is accounted for!

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Rise of the planet of the adorable apes

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Mark Trail, 1/19/18

Welp, looks like those giraffes Rusty spotted last week are actually part of a whole herd of exotic animals freely roaming around Lost Forest, presumably because after the Tingling Bros. Circus farewell tour the circus’s creditors ordered the entire menagerie to be simply released into the woods rather than making an expensive attempt to find new homes for the beasts. You’re probably thinking that this uniformed monkey is in charge of all these creatures, but in fact he’s a mere lieutenant for their true king, the Great Wilhelm, who’s holed up in an inaccessible forest lair screaming out his orders.

Shoe, 1/19/18

Roz runs what I believe is one of the of the only dining establishments in Treetops (is there also a fancy white-tablecloth French restaurant with snooty bird-waiters? I’m pretty sure there is, but I’m not going to bother to check) but one of the jokes of the strip is that she is actually pretty bad at cooking. Nevertheless, all of the characters continue coming to her diner to order food, either because of their aforementioned lack of other options (but why doesn’t the invisible hand wing of the free market push someone else into starting a rival with more palatable fare?) or because they all love cruelly taunting Roz, and the gastic side-effects of eating her food is a small price to pay for the opportunity to do so. Anyway, what I’m saying is, I guess the joke in today’s strip is supposed to be that, like Roz’s burnt cooking, Roz’s cookbook (but how could someone mainly known for making unappetizing food score a coveted publishing deal?) managed to set off some smoke alarms, but the facial expressions on display here (Shoe all heavy-lidded menace, Roz bug-eyed with rage) imply that maybe Shoe just led a book-burning, right there in the middle of Barnes & Noble.

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CHOMP MUNCH/ MUNCH GRIND: pure poetry

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Mark Trail, 1/10/17

Hey, remember four and a half years ago when Rusty dozed off and had a vivid dream about dinosaurs? Well, now he’s out picking apples for his pancakes (don’t ask, man) and has suddenly encountered … a giraffe!? [record scratch noise] I’m assuming the whole apple-picking sequence was a dream to start with, or maybe he ate some “bad apples” (ha ha, get it, wait, no I mean it literally) and is hallucinating, but maybe … this giraffe escaped from the circus? Or from Africa? Maybe it’s an agent of Chris “Dirty” Dyer, recently resident in Africa himself, as part of the sport of hunting down Mark Trail? I imagine this majestic African herbivore would appreciate being the hunter rather than the hunted for once. Shoe’s on the other hoof now, H. sapiens!

Shoe, 1/10/17

The Perfesser’s extreme depression is of course legendary, but let’s not neglect the sad state of his nephew/ward’s emotional life. He should be at least a little gleeful at the prospect of subverting the banal expectations of his teachers, but he’s clearly crushed by the burden of coming up with yet another quippy answer to his test. “Is this … is this what they want?” he seems to be thinking, as he slouches down into his desk. “Is this all there is?”