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Arctic Circle, 1/31/20

Another one of the new strips I’m reading, in addition to weird tales of stir-crazy dads, is Arctic Circle, and before you smugly say “Hey, what are these penguins doing in the Arctic,” know that their migration there is part of the bit. Anyway, the strip mostly seems to be the penguins looking on his horror as ecological collapse leads to narwhals savagely impaling each other, so it should be a hoot to follow!

Pros and Cons, 1/31/20

Pros and Cons, meanwhile, promises to extend the Law and Order model by including not just cops and prosecutors but defense attorneys and psychiatrists in its examination of the criminal justice system. Or so the King Features site would have you believe; this week features people who without that intro would read as generic white collar professionals making extremely broad social commentary in various eating and drinking establishments. Still, you can see the strip’s highbrow aspirations here: where else on the comics page will those fat cat modern architects, who greedily demand payment for the professional services they provide, get what’s coming to them? In Blondie? In Hi and Lois? I think not.

Dennis the Menace, 1/31/20

Damn, this strip is having a particularly non-menacing week. “America’s lovable late night clown prince, Jimmy Fallon, is keeping me from getting the rest I need to excel at school” isn’t quite as non-menacing as “These onions are bullying my eyes!”, but it’s pretty close.

Six Chix, 1/31/20

As a certified public transit enthusiast, I’m very glad the influential comic strip industry is weighing on one of my pet peeves. While many people who don’t routinely take transit focus on point-to-point speed, they fail to take waiting time into consideration, and often don’t see the point of funding frequent service. [low muttering] But headways low enough to allow passengers to “show up and and go” at the time of their choice [muttering grows louder, shouts of “get him off” become audible] are often more important [I am physically dragged off stage, but break free] than express service when it comes to [a net falls over me, leaving me unable to flee] the passenger exper[a single tranquilizer dart hits home and I lose consciousness]

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Six Chix, 1/10/20

Folks, I’m honestly impressed by how much “a lot going on here” this relatively sparsely drawn Six Chix packs in today. Let’s start with all the ways in which the ostensible “joke” doesn’t actually work: the term “red-handed” is a reference to a murderer being caught with literal blood on their hands, not a reference to the color of human hands themself, most of which are not what you’d call “red”; nevertheless, I guess the punchline here is supposed to be that gray poodles tend to have gray paws, which is severely undermined by the colorist’s choice to make the arrested poodle yellow. Unless there’s some kind of … gray evidence of crime that dogs are known for? Pretty sure dogs don’t have gray blood, though I admit I’m not a scientist or anything. Anyway, I feel bad because all this distracts from what I think is the real horror here: it’s normal for animals to not wear clothes, and it’s fine if your anthropomorphized animals wear clothes, but if you have an animal wearing only a hat and a police badge, I’m going to imagine him as functionally equivalent to a naked person wearing only a hat and a police badge, and honestly the way this dog’s tongue is hanging out and his tail is wagging really isn’t helping with the whole vibe.

Crock, 1/10/20

Speaking of colorist errors, I kind of like that whoever was coloring today’s Crock decided “look, Crock takes place in the desert, we always make the ground bright yellow sand, and I’ll be damned if I figure out what the inside of a salt mine looks like, you hear me? I’m not Google image searching this shit, life is far too short!”

Marvin, 1/10/20

Gotta give credit where it’s due: could you spend the last 38 years, as the comic strip Marvin has, coming up with increasingly weird and off-putting scenarios in which the title character makes eye contact with one or both parents while shitting? I’ll bet you couldn’t. I’ll bet you don’t have the stamina.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/10/20

Whoops, looks like in addition to having a big personality and a tendency to show up unannounced, Aunt Tildy is … a comical drunk? More on the exasperated facial expressions Rex makes about this as events warrant.

Mary Worth, 1/10/20

“Please, doctor! I’m literally melting from panel to panel! Test that thyroid and test it now, with all your might!”

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Crock, 1/2/20

As a Buffalo native, it’s a constant source of both amusement and mild irritation to discover that many, many people don’t know that Buffalo wings are called that because they were first invented at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, a mere 15-minute walk from where my father lives today! Very few people are so misguided as to make the Jessica Simpson-esque mistake of believing they’re actually made from buffalo (the animal), but lots of folks seem to think that the particular type of sauce we associate with Buffalo wings got that name because of some vague association between the power of a rampaging buffalo and the power of, uh, spiciness?

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is: good job, today’s Crock, for getting this basic fact correct. However, that isn’t going to distract me from pointing out all the other problems with this comic, which include, but are not limited to:

• I think the strip’s structure encourages us to read more into the implied metaphor than it can actually support. I guess it’s supposed to mean “Grossie can’t cook, so having Grossie pack my lunch sucks, just like being a chicken born in Buffalo sucks,” but my brain keeps wanting to make it about how she’s, like, fattening him up so she can cook him or something.
• Thanks to the supply chains of modern agriculture, most chickens are born, raised, and slaughtered thousands of miles away from where their remains will eventually be cooked and eaten, and Western New York has no real poultry industry. A chicken born in Buffalo is in fact more likely to live in some hipster’s backyard coop where it will happily live out a relatively long life providing eggs than to end up as wings.
• Buffalo wings have in fact become a staple of bar food across the United States, and so honestly the whole geography question has very little do with it. The plain fact is that the huge majority of chickens born in the world are destined for slaughter, which quite honestly ought to put the whole business of the bologna sandwiches your wife packs for you being subpar in perspective.
• This isn’t directly pertinent to the joke per se, but it’s well established that Maggot digs latrine pits for a living, right? And that’s what he’s standing in, eating his lunch? He’s up to his waist in a latrine pit? Pretty unpleasant, in my opinion.

Anyway, here’s a last Buffalo wing fun fact for you: in Buffalo, we just call them “wings” or “chicken wings”! Interesting, huh?

Six Chix, 1/2/20

I’m excited to see all six of the chix offer their own takes on the Chicken Little mythos one by one, and I gotta say that while I don’t on any level like this joke, I at least recognize that it more or less is a joke, which gives it a leg up on whatever it is that’s going on here. Might we get to a laugh-provoking Chicken-Little-themed punchline by the end of 2020? Dare to dream!