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Six Chix, 6/29/23

The verb scoff, dictionaries will tell you, means to speak derisively about someone or something, or treat them with scorn, and that’s how I’ve used it pretty much my whole adult life. But recently I began to have a panicked feeling that I’ve been wrong, because in closed captioning for most movies or TV shows, the word is often put in brackets to indicate that a character is making a dismissive little noise like “tcha” or thereabouts. Was the noise scoffing, and I had incorrectly extended it to metaphorically describe the attitude that the noise conveyed? I had not, but was primed to worry about this because it would be the opposite trajectory of a habit I had in my youth, when I read Peanuts anthologies obsessively and correctly understood from them that “sigh” was an expression of melancholy, but didn’t understand that in those strips it was standing in for a nonverbal sound so I just went around saying the word “sigh” aloud when I was sad or wistful. No adult ever corrected me on this, presumably because it was very, very funny. Anyway, that’s what I always think about when I see the word “sigh” in a comic or indeed anywhere else. I have no idea what today’s Six Chix is getting at.

Dennis the Menace, 6/29/23

I absolutely love the look on this lady’s face. She just met Dennis and has already determined that she has zero time for his shit. Honestly, more people should take this attitude towards him, it might improve his behavior considerably.

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Dennis the Menace, 6/4/23

Part of my whole shtick on this blog is making fun of comics that just do the same jokes over and over, which itself has become repetitive, so I guess I should cautiously give Dennis the Menace credit for trying something new today, though I’m not sure if having an ill-tempered little spat with a kid on an opposing baseball team really counts as “menacing.” Honestly it’s a lot more menacing that CJ’s dog and father-coach just kind of manifest themselves out of thin air on second base in the middle of play. Also, are we supposed to take from the final panel that Dennis’s team is being coached by Henry? If so, I think it’s a funny choice to not even show him, so we can imagine him looking genuinely hurt and saying “Hey, CJ, hey … that’s not cool, man. Come on.”

Marvin, 6/4/23

Similarly, I’ll give Marvin credit from taking a day from its primary obsession (pooping) and instead dwelling on a secondary obsession (the “family” in Marvin & Family is a complex web of relationships, many of which border on outright hatred).

Dick Tracy, 6/4/23

Sprocket Nitrate was introduced in this strip way back in 2014, and her shoelessness was part of her whole deal as a dirty hippie. That was a long time ago, and now it’s the year 2023, when you can absolutely just put things in the comics pages for people who like foot stuff, so now she’s cleaned up her act a bit and being barefoot is itself her whole deal, as we’ll be shown in multiple panels per strip. Anyway, I’m glad that today’s strip also caters to my particular sicko fetish (clean, efficient intercity passenger rail travel).

Six Chix, 6/4/23

I gotta say, in the category of truly deranged Six Chix strips, this is one that I liked. That lady’s friend succumbed to Birkenstocks! She succumbed to Birkenstocks and she fuckin’ died, it’s very funny to me.

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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.