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Six Chix, 7/3/23

I like this one! I like this one because it implies either that crabs are the undersea equivalent of Americans, or that in the far future, Americans will evolve into crabs and take to the sea in order to escape our blighted surface but still retain a dim memory of the national habits and holidays of their distant ancestors. Either way, they exist in some sort of celebratory symbiosis with the jellyfish, a relationship that (I hope) is mutually beneficial.

The Lockhorns, 7/3/23

I’m really loving these two dudes sitting at the bar with big smiles on their faces. They’re all in the Hate Wife Club! Leroy is their new best friend and tonight they’re gonna tear this town up (have three more cocktails, get morose, the other two are going to call their wives up and beg for forgiveness and go home and leave Leroy with the beardy bartender who gets increasingly pointed as closing time approaches and Leroy continues to refuse to make eye contact).

Pluggers, 7/3/23

C’mon, man, that’s not a possum, that’s a bear! Oh, wait, he’s just playing possum. Anyway, c’mon, man, he’s not pretending to be dead, he’s actually dead! Been dead for hours! Kangaroo lady’s going to figure it out soon and it’s gonna hit her like a ton of bricks!

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Blondie, 6/30/23

The idea of being put in a situation where you respond to someone awkwardly in the moment and dwell on it later is of course relatable. I would think that a fun way to grapple with that situation in an art form like the comics would be to think up a snappy response at your leisure and then write up a little scenario where you get to use it in the moment, rather than doing a strip where you flop and then are embarrassed and resentful for the rest of the day. I guess that’s why I’m just a humble critic and not actually the writer of a widely syndicated newspaper strip (I also did not inherit a widely beloved syndicated newspaper strip from my father, which may be a factor there).

Family Circus, 6/30/23

I’m really enjoying Ma Keane’s little smile here. “Should I tell him it’s dead now, and watch his little face crumble? Or would it be more fun to see him walking around with a dead bug in a jar for the rest of the day?”

Hi and Lois, 6/30/23

“People like getting bombed, kid. Why not ask Mr. Thurston about it? If he’s not ‘asleep.’”

Six Chix, 6/30/23

The crotch is next, folks. The crotch is next

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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.