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Dennis the Menace, 2/10/17

I’m not going to claim that making dick jokes about Mary Worth is like digging ditches or anything, but writing this blog does take a certain psychic toll on me! For instance, I bet that for your job today you didn’t have to sort through the Google Image Search results for “Angry Hitler” to find the one that matched best:

Anyway, Mr. Wilson sure is “hot under the collar,” ha ha ha! By which we mean that the very presence of his innocent neighbor tyke is driving him into a state of blackout rage that, while it may not result in an immediate crippling stroke, is probably wearing years off his remaining life. But since he’s incapable of finding relaxed enjoyment in his own home, death will no doubt come as a blessing.

Shoe, 2/10/17

Shoe is a strip that started out being about a bunch of talking anthropomorphic birds to be “funny,” I guess, but has long sense lost any sense of its birdness to the extent that it makes bird-jokes unrelated to its bird-characters. Thus, it actually comes as sort of a relief to me that there’s enough internal logic still at play to make the town mortician a buzzard, even if the implication is that Mort has taken on the job of arranging the funerals of his fellow citizens primarily so he can feast on their corpses.

Speaking of corpses, isn’t Loon employed by the local newspaper? I guess he figures he should get out of the media game while he still can and get in on the one industry that will never, ever lose its market.

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Pluggers, 2/4/17

Pluggers today made me realize that it’s been a long time since I’ve been in a house of worship for non-wedding-or-funeral-related reasons — long enough that it never occurred to me that the same people who infuriate me for blithely texting throughout a movie (WHY WOULD YOU PAY $16.50 A TICKET TO SEE SILENCE, A QUIET AND EMOTIONALLY GRUELLING CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE FROM A MASTER FILMMAKER, ON ITS OPENING WEEKEND, AND THEN BE ON YOUR PHONE THE WHOLE TIME? YOU’RE A GROWN-ASS ADULT! YES, I CAN SEE YOU!) also do it while they’re at church, to the extent that beleaguered clergy have to beg parishioners to put their gizmos in their pockets for just a little while, for pete’s sake, just how flight attendants have to specifically point out that you can’t vape in 30,000 feet over Nebraska or whatever.

And, while my irreligion probably differentiates me from most pluggers, I do have to say that as a person with a hearing aid I very, very strongly related to today’s panel. Like, the ability to turn a hearing aid off is easily one of the top five best things about having one. It’s not that I can’t hear with it off, but … well, it’s sort of like when you open a beer right when you get home from a hard day’s work. Your problems don’t go away, but it takes the edge off, you know?

Shoe, 2/4/17

I know it’s something I harp on a lot, but the emotional disconnect between the jokes and dialogue in Shoe is one of my favorite bizarre things about the strip! Usually this takes the form of the patented goggle eyes of horror in reaction to a punchline, but today’s strip gets even more intense. “Roz, I need something to release all this tension I have” is mildly concerning in isolation; but when accompanied with the Perfesser’s bug-eyed stare, it seems like the last thing you hear a guy say before you become the first victim in his multi-state killing spree.

Mary Worth, 2/4/17

Oh my God, Iris just told Zak she loves him … in German! Safe in the knowledge that sweet, dim, uncultured Zak would never in a million years understand it! This is a delight because it’s a move she chose to make wholly predicated on her boy-toy’s ignorance, but it makes me sad because it probably means she’s going back to Wilbur when he blows back into town. Hopefully he hasn’t picked up any nasty Antarctic venereal diseases!

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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.