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Spider-Man, 1/16/17

Say, what’s been going on with the Amazing Spider-Man lately? Welp, that space capsule he got dressed to open up contained beloved Guardian Of The Galaxy Rocket Raccoon, returning this May to theaters everywhere thanks to CGI and Bradley Cooper’s golden voice! Now he and Spidey and MJ are off on a wacky road trip to catch Ronan, the Accuser, but first, they must defeat their greatest enemy: sleepiness.

Shoe and Slylock Fox, 1/16/17

Here we have pretty firm proof that Shoe and Slylock Fox take place in different universes. In Shoe, the bird-people built up their civilization themselves, and within living memory: only a few generations ago, they lived in nature, like the birds we know. We can assume that any similarity between their material culture and ours can be chalked up to convergent development. Slylock and his sapient animal counterparts, on the other hand, are clearly living in the cities that humanity built, riding New York’s subway and marveling at the Statue of Liberty in the harbor (do they think her a dead Goddess of a vanished race?). But the construction crane seems to indicate that the animals are at last beginning to put their own imprint on the city; maybe in a century or two all evidence of humanity will be finally lost.

Crankshaft, 1/16/17

I think it’s important to remember that even those artists we think of as driven by pure, inner genius functioned in a larger society and economy and had to cater to a certain extent to popular tastes. In this sense they’re different from comic strip creators, who can apparently just go with smug, unfunny punchlines with no obvious appeal to anybody.

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Hey, everyone! Before we launch into this week’s comics, I want to draw your attention to the Mary Worth And Me blog, where faithful reader Wanders has this year’s Worthy Awards nominees up! You get to vote in a number of categories, including Best Storyline, Outstanding Performances by Guest and Recurring Characters, Outstanding Panel, and, of course, the most coveted Worthy Statuette of all, Outstanding Performance By A Floating Head. Vote early, vote often!

Beetle Bailey, 12/19/16

One of my less favorite Beetle Bailey running jokes is the “troops dress up in wacky outfits and call it ‘camouflage’” joke that pops up on the regular. Obviously an army has to learn how to blend into the natural environment, but I’m reasonably certain that nobody has gone into either combat or an army training exercise dressed as either a bipedal, armless sheep or a bale of green hay with a visible face and limbs. In this lineup of madness, Beetle’s disguise actually seems most grounded in reality: after all, the history of soliders who have defected to the enemy when expedient — and indeed become their former opponents’ biggest cheerleaders — is as long as the history of warfare.

Shoe, 12/19/16

I spent an entire lifetime of comic reading getting accustomed to a world where sapient bird-people engage in journalism and live in a tree-city where certain architectural elements resemble those developed for human civilization, but today I feel like I’ve had a pretty important additional element — that said bird people are slightly more sophisticated than us technologically, and have access to near-future innovations like self-driving cars — dumped on me with little warning. Anyway, it’s good to have my fundamental pessimism confirmed here: even when the cars drive themselves, the rest of life is still going to suck.

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Funky Winkerbean, 12/1/16

Oh, so, if you’re curious, serial star Cliff Anger did time in prison because he tangled with Joe McCarthy during the Red Scare! You might be tempted to read something into this regarding Current Political Events, but in fact Funky Winkerbeans are written a year in advance, so it’s really just a chance to say “What if this cranky ancillary character who seemed like a loser … were also a martyr?” Anyway, Cliff took a job on tramp steamer in the summer of 1940, and that tramp steamer heroically sailed right through the Atlantic and the Baltic when those seas were an active war zone just so that Cliff could hang out with his good buddy and political idol, Joe Stalin. Unfortunately this was a full 18 months before Stalin became a stalward ally in America’s war against fascism, so Cliff had to pay the price.

Shoe, 12/1/16

What’s hotter than bird-on-bird sexual encounters initiated by sad drunks in a depressing fern bar? Bird-on-bird sexual encounters initiated by sad drunks in a depressing fern bar that make up part of a satanic ritual, apparently!