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Sam and Silo, 9/9/22

In their book Engineering Happiness, economists Rakesh Sarin and Manel Baucells define the “fundamental question” of wellbeing as Happiness = Reality – Expectations. Here, Sam and Silo illustrate the special case when you can’t do the math.

Six Chix, 9/9/22

This strip about a mess is the tidiest artwork we’ve seen in Six Chix all week.

Dick Tracy, 9/9/22

Dick Tracy babies enter the world under a cloud of schtick. “Attitude” here was named for Eddie Tude, a rando pizza delivery driver who drove mom Gertie to the maternity hospital in 2011. We’re informed he (Attitude) is ugly, but never see his face. He has an owl pet/mimic/familiar. He throws things at his dad B.O., though without enough force to actually kill the annoying old coot. He is a disappointment to Dick Tracy fans in every possible way.

Sally Forth, 9/9/22

Sally, you’re in H.R. You’ll be plenty busy once the restructuring gets rolling, followed by plenty of time off.

Well, time to pack things up around here and wipe the bourbon off the console for Josh’s triumphant return. Thanks for a delightful time!

–Uncle Lumpy

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Crankshaft, 8/19/22

“Slight markup” is my favorite part of this. Crankshaft isn’t doing this for the money! He’s doing it so he can make a big show out of being an asshole.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/19/22

Hey, remember how, at Les’s suggestion, Lisa made a bunch of videotapes before she died for Summer to watch over the course of her adolescence? Well, this week in Funky Winkerbean we learned that in fact, it was Crazy Harry’s idea! Pretty wild, huh? Does this upend everything you thought you knew about this strip? No? You say you actually don’t spend much time thinking about Funky Winkerbean, and while you vaguely remembered the whole videotape thing, you didn’t actually remember that it was supposedly Les’s idea and don’t really know why you should care that it wasn’t? Interesting. Interesting.

Marvin, 8/19/22

Look, I know the question of “what mental age is Marvin, the title character in the comic strip Marvin, supposed to be” is a muddled one, but this is still a kid who pisses and shits himself on the regular. He’s not thinking about the future at all! He’s never thought about anything but the present.

Six Chix, 8/19/22

Oh, sorry, are Marvin’s piss jokes too “basic” for you? Well, check out Six Chix, where the piss jokes are extremely baroque.

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Blondie, 7/20/22

One of my least favorite running bits in this strip is when Dagwood and his work friends enact some elaborate scenario to match up with whatever pan-cultural event or sports championship or anniversary is on the big calendar hanging on the wall over at Blondie HQ. But I really appreciate how this strip subverted my expectations: I genuinely thought the final panel would be some dumb scene with people in homemade spacesuits or whatever but instead it’s just Dithers saying “Get it? He’s a big lazy dipshit! Just look at him. Doesn’t really have anything to do with the moon, I just wanted an excuse to point that out.”

Six Chix, 7/20/22

I genuinely appreciate the scenario being laid out here: that this is a sophisticated vampire bar where humans are killed and drained of their blood (presumably not in that order) in the kitchen so that the clientele can just enjoy their sustenance in a civilized way from glassware without having to fight for it for once, but Vlad and his newfangled vegan vampirism is so repellent to the proprietors that they just threw coffin full of oranges at him and were like “Here, you figure it out, you sick freak.”