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Shoe, 5/28/16

FUN FACT ABOUT WHAT A NERD I AM: I read this punchline and for a brief moment thought it was a joke about the UK’s notoriously lax libel laws, instead of what it actually is, which is a joke about how Shoe has lots of ex-wives who hate him, haw haw. Meanwhile, here’s a question for discussion: are they talking about the normal human-ruled England we know and love, or some in-universe bird-ruled England, with a bird queen and a bird Prime Minister and a bird Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer and a Parliament that’s knee deep in bird shit?

Blondie, 5/28/16

You have to almost admire Dagwood’s phone shouting technique, in which he holds the phone directly in front of his face and shouts into it as loudly as he can. You also have to admit that if you were an ISP employee or NSA spy and were snooping around someone’s email, you’d probably expect a conversation with pete@porkapalooza.com to be at least mildly sexually titillating.

Judge Parker, 5/28/16

I can’t tell if this is yet another example of “ancillary characters in Judge Parker sacrifice to make the insanely wealthy protagonists even richer,” or if Neddy is so insanely wealthy that she just has no idea what an actual normal salary looks like.

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Shoe, 5/17/16

As America’s #1 Blogger Who Thinks The Bird-People Of Shoe Should Behave More Like Actual Birds, my immediate reaction upon reading this strip was to Google “can birds digest gluten?” While evidence is inconclusive, by which I mean I couldn’t find anything on the first page of results, I did learn about “angel wing syndrome,” which, according to a web page with disturbing pictures I found on the Internet, is when baby birds eat too much bread because people like to feed bread to adorable baby birds, and as a result their wings don’t develop properly. But are underdeveloped wings only the first stage in the bird de-evolution caused by eating processed carbohydrates? Is this colony of grotesque bird-people, featherèd and beakèd but also clothèd and handèd, simply the result of too much gluten? Is Roz’s customer not a goof on current dietary fads, but rather a brave soul trying to set her children free of the trap from which her generation can never escape?

Crock, 5/17/16

Hey, guys, remember when Crock’s creator’s son decided he didn’t want to do the strip anymore, back in 2012, and there was going to be maybe a couple years of reruns and that was it? Welp, it’s 2016 and Crock is still happening, at least on King Features’ website, and who knows if its in repeats or what. Like, a beeper joke would be about 20 years out of date, but a lot of jokes in Crock seemed 20 years out of date even when new strips were being produced, so! Anyway, assuming this is a repeat, it’s a good example how the passage of time can totally change the effect of a piece of art: whereas in 1995 or whatever the point of this strip would have been “Ha ha, the kids today, they take their beepers with them everywhere,” today it serves as a eulogy for an important technology that was rapidly displaced before it had a chance to become truly ubiquitous.

Hi and Lois, 5/17/16

Irma’s tragedy is that the day when the American suburb was a hotbed of sexual experimentation has long passed, but the ennui of suburban alienation has endured.

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Judge Parker, 5/13/16

I can’t really decide whether Judge Parker HQ has an elaborate “follow the money” chart on the wall that explains precisely the complex financial relationship between country star Rocky Ledge, movie star Godiva Danube, Rocky’s tell-all book about his marriage to Godiva, and Neddy’s old person sweatshop, or if the details keep shifting and the point is just to keep these two good-looking nutballs in the strip somehow. All I know is that there are plenty of people who would pay someone good money to stare at them with eyes like Godiva’s in panel three and order them to “get down on your knees and thank us for your tawdry windfall.”

Shoe, 5/13/16

You might think, based on my last eleven or twelve years of blogging, that I’m a cynical guy who hates joy. Untrue! For instance, today’s Shoe provided me with the image of a group of elderly bird-people gleefully dipping their heads into a giant vat of applesauce, and I’m grinning as goofily thinking about it as Biz is.