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Archive: Six Chix

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Trixie will be rendered using what critics are calling “the most unsettling CGI yet”

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Six Chix, 5/24/23

Six Chix is a long-running feature that dares to ask the question, “What if women wrote a comic strip? What would we learn about the female sex in the process?” I think we can agree that the answer, if we’re just going by the content of Six Chix, is that women are floridly insane, but you have to admit that they’re more interesting than men, who are just annoying and boring.

Gil Thorp, 5/24/23

One of my tasks as the creator of a blog about newspaper comics, the most nostalgia-infected art form ever created, is to fight against the particularly pernicious type of nostalgia that leads people to say that the past is always better than the present. Like, for instance, longtime Thorp-heads probably would smugly say that, in terms of unpaid randos who helped coach the Mudlark baseball team, it wouldn’t get any funnier than a guy who called himself Clambake and lied about being in the Negro Leagues. And yet today, in this supposedly fallen year 2023, we have a blind guy urging two blindfolded teenagers to hurl baseballs in his general direction, simultaneously! Truly, I tell you that we still live in an age of wonders.

Hi and Lois, 5/24/23

I know the media landscape is troubled and subject to ongoing corporate consolidation, but I don’t know that teasing the idea of an incredible crossover between Spider-Man and his Avengers Pals with the Walker-Browne Extended Universe is the best way for King Features Syndicate parent company Hearst Communications to solicit a takeover bid from the Walt Disney Company.

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The frolicking dolphins are eager to welcome Wilbur to the watery grave he keeps dodging

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Six Chix, 5/11/23

So the thing about “sudden,” as a noun, is that it has completely fallen out of use in English outside the set phrase “all of a sudden,” and even when it was in use there wasn’t any particularly strong syntactical or grammatical reason why it took an indefinite article in that phrase rather than a definite one, so it’s pretty natural for modern-day speakers to start reanalyzing and rearranging the phrase, and as long as people know what you mean it’s hard to say you’re doing it “wrong.” Still, some people care a lot about being right in linguistic matters; I found this out the hard way when I got into a discussion on the comments of this very blog in which I pointed out that “none” is not a contraction for “not one” and has always been used in both the singular and plural, with recorded uses of “none are” going back to Chaucer, and this caused one commenter to melt down at me and then quit the site altogether. I have my own odd things I’m overly attached to, of course, but at least none of them have me visualizing myself as an angry pulsing green blob holding the line against a bunch of purple blobs that look pretty chill, honestly.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/11/23

Now I’m imagining the elaborate beehive coif Snuffy had to create to fit his new hair under his hat so that nobody could catch even a glimpse of it while he dashed from his home to this cave, presumably so he wasn’t immediately burned at the stake for engaging in witchcraft. Granny Creeps is powerful enough, or helps enough leading citizens of the Holler with her potions, to avoid that fate herself, but a local layabout and troublemaker like Snuffy is the sort of person who might be made an example of.

Mary Worth, 5/11/23

There’s not a lot about Dr. Jeff I find particularly worthy of praise or envy, but despite being a core Mary Worth character he seems to not put a ton of effort into keeping up with Wilbur’s sex life, and you have to respect that.

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Happy … birthday? … to the earth

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Six Chix, 4/22/23

I feel like there are few more depressing sentences in the English language than “cake is biodegradable,” which implies that these people aren’t going to eat this delicious cake but are rather just going to leave it out in this open field to slowly rot. These are (I think?) children and the cake is almost as big as they are, so it’s unrealistic to expect them to eat all of it, but still, it’s quite melancholy. I suppose it’s supposed to be the Earth Day equivalent of that time a British train museum tossed a chocolate cake into a locomotive’s firebox for its 145th birthday, but like, a lot less fun.

Rhymes With Orange, 4/22/23

A lot of strips did Earth Day jokes today, and I spent quite a while trying to figure out if this was one of them, but I don’t think it was! I think it’s just a strip asking us to contemplate whether a bird cleaning the food out of a crocodile’s teeth is an erotic experience, for either party.

Mary Worth, 4/22/23

If you were at a karaoke studio and a visibly angry man got on stage and announced “This song is dedicated to me … because I need to hear this!”, how excited would you be for what was about to happen, on a scale from 10 to some kind of number that’s so large that only our most powerful computers could even generate it?