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Six Chix, 6/1/22

Look, I’ll admit that I’ve spent quite a bit of time on this website — too much time, really — inflicting my musings about mermaid biology onto you, the innocent reader. Shamefully, a lot of it has focused on their reproductive lifecycle, thanks to Hagar the Horrible always shoving that in our face, but today I want to talk about locomotion. Usually when you see depictions of mermaids, they’re sitting on rocks jutting out of the sea or the beach or something, and without much thought you can accept that they kind of hopped up out of the water like a seal. But even if this bar is right on the wharf, this mermaid would have had a long way to go to get there, presumably dragging herself over the boardwalk and then across the floor of the bar before somehow managing to haul herself up on that stool. Have mermaids evolved extremely strong arms in order traverse land when necessary to escape predators or drop environmental knowledge on ignorant humans? Or does their powerful fluke propel them across the ground in a sort of flopping motion?

Funky Winkerbean, 6/1/22

Remember when Funky Winkerbean did a big time jump forward, like ten years ago, and loudly proclaimed that it would be focusing on a new generation of teenagers, and that its former teens, now a bunch of swiftly decaying middle-aged losers, would fade into the background, but then that never happened, because Funky Winkerbean in the ’70s may have been about fun teens but Funky Winkerbean in the 21st century can only ever be about how you, the reader, personally, are dying? Well, now the teens are taking on crippling debt, just to so that their own universe will pay more attention to them because they too are suffering. It’s sad, really!

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Six Chix, 3/23/22

One of those things that I never thought about until I learned it and then I thought about it all the time is that nowhere in the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme is it stated that he’s an egg, yet this is, universally, how we envision him. The main theory explaining this is that the rhyme was originally conceived of as a riddle: “humpty dumpty” was a general slang term of abuse for the short and squat, and so the joke was something like “Sure, seems weird that some little fat dude fell off the wall and broke into pieces … but what if we told you that actually, he was an egg? Eh?” Humor, notoriously, does not translate well across eras, and this is a pretty good example of that in play! You know what does play well across eras, though? Body horror! That’s why I’m wholeheartedly endorsing the Six Chix reboot of the Humpty Dumpty mythos, in which the Humpty Dumpty was deliberately taunted into hurling himself to a horrifying death so that his “inner bird” could be set free. Each bird in this grim world must convince other beings to die in order to perpetuate their species. It’s grim stuff!

Crankshaft, 3/23/22

If you “run” Montoni’s pizza through “the pipeline” (of your digestive tract), you’ll experience any number of unpleasant side effects, at both ends and the middle, which might in some sense be interpreted as “saluting”. Sorry you had to visualize that, but the motto of this blog long ago shifted from “I read the comics so you don’t have to” to “I involuntarily contemplated Ed Crankshaft’s pizza-farts so now you’re going to have to as well.”

Gil Thorp, 3/23/22

I know, in theory, that the teens in the first two panels have just finished a practice, and it’s only in the second panel that we’ve zoomed in enough to see that Parnit is sweating as one normally does after such exertion. But what it looks like is that Pranit has been told that he’ll be allowed back in the lineup after being suspended for his little “I accidentally became a bookie and hired an enforcer” oopsie and has immediately broken into a frenzied, manic sweat of excitement. He might have a problem not messing up between now and the game! Looks like he’s gonna mess up right there, to be honest!

Judge Parker and The Phantom, 3/23/22

Sorry I have not been keeping you up to date on Judge Parker and The Phantom, but I did want to point out that they’re both drawn by Mike Manley but written by two different people, and I would like to imagine that Manley enjoyed getting the scripts this week and finding out that he would get to do two explosions on the same day.

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Gil Thorp, 11/4/21

The … B? C? … plot of the fall Gil Thorp storyline is that star running back Chance Macy isn’t really interested in the enticements of the many colleges trying to recruit him, which is definitely perplexing everyone around him, including Boyd, who graciously offers to YouTube-hypnotize Chance with a little flashlight into making him want a full college scholarship and also a debilitating series of concussions, but Chance values his free will just a little too much. Meanwhile, it turns out that the faculty member buying into Boyd’s hypnosis theories is the one you’d least expect: Coach Mrs. Coach Thorp, who’s attempting to plant post-hypnotic suggestions into Kiana so that whenever she sees an opponent with a ball in their hands, she’ll fly into a murderous rage and do anything to get it back. Will that actually be helpful for winning volleyball games? Ultimately that’s for the referee to decide, but it seems worth a shot.

Six Chix, 11/4/21

I guess this lady … thinks these butterflies are angels? And that’s why they’re asking if she’s got problems with her eyes? Because she’s not seeing them for what they are, which is butterflies, and also demons straight from the bowels of hell? This has been “Josh tries and fails to interpret today’s Six Chix,” I thank you for your time and attention.

Hi and Lois, 11/4/21

Oh, man, check out Hi’s facial expression in panel two. Lois may not know how dumb their infant daughter is, but Hi is clearly all too aware of the limits of his son’s mental ambitions.