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Blondie and Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/20/25

No one person can know the totality of human cultural practice, of course, even within their own country, and I’ve had the repeated experience on this blog of seeing some odd behavior in a comic strip, posting “Nobody does this, right?”, and then being told in no uncertain terms that said behavior is in fact normal and I’m weird for not knowing about it. For instance, at least one person claimed that “blonde moment” is not just a thing that people say, but is actually more common than “senior moment” in their experience. Life is a rich tapestry! Anyway, my main request to the comics is that they at least stay on the same page when they confront me with some novel practice. For instance, do children actually go door to door during the day on Easter Sunday asking for chocolate, as a spring mirror of Halloween trick-or-treating? Or is this the sort of plan that aspiring hillbilly grifter children would come up with, and we’re meant to understand that nobody would possibly go along with it?

Panel from Slylock Fox, 4/20/25

So, uh, who do you guys think drove that car into the ocean? They’re dead now, right? They received a watery comeuppance for their bank-robbing crimes? Their bones have been picked free of flesh by the crabs, and are loosely piled on the floor of the car?

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Gil Thorp, 4/14/24

Look, my mission is as always to read the comics so you don’t have to, but sometimes with the continuity strips you really do need to read them daily, because the seemingly insignificant ones are there to set up the highlights. For instance, today’s strip, in which Marty is doing Step 9 of the twelve AA steps at the lady who took over his job and his beloved wooden crate press box, is much funnier if you had read Saturday’s strip, which establishes that he’s doing this in the middle of a game, probably in the hopes that some of his apology goes out on-air and people feel sorry for him and proud of the hard work he’s doing and give him his job back.

Heathcliff, 4/14/25

I’ve always assumed that Team Heathcliff resents Garfield at some level because, even though Heathcliff was the first orange cat comic on the block by several years, it never became the multimillion dollar marketing and merchandising juggernaut that Garfield evolved into. But then I see strips like today’s and realize that Heathcliff clings fiercely to its punk rock ethos. “You hate Mondays because you’re pandering to some sub-Dilbert level workaday everyman relatable feeling,” you can imagine Heathcliff saying here. “I love Mondays because I get to make other people hate them by ripping their face off and stealing their milk. We are not the same.”

Slylock Fox, 4/14/25

Wow, the post animalpocalypse society really is becoming more and more like ours every day, as Slylock (who I assume works for the Forestville Bureau of Investigations) becomes increasingly focused in getting one up in the bureaucratic war against the FSA (“they rely too much on high-tech gadgets and refuse to do the real legwork of law enforcement!”) and kind of forgets to do anything about Weirdly and the current giant robot situation.

Pardon My Planet, 4/14/25

Hey, man, uh, what do you think is in the milk you buy in the store. Like, for real. Because I don’t think milk works the way you think it works, like, at all?

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 3/30/25

This is at least the second time that Slylock Fox has proposed the old “one person divides, the other chooses” solution to this kind of dispute, and when the first one was published five years ago I already went on at great length about how I first encountered that idea in T*A*C*K, a sub-Encyclopedia Brown series of distinctly Slylockian “mysteries” for kids. So I guess today I’ll focus on our hapless canine judge. Criminal investigation and prosecution are the flashiest part of the legal system, and the post-human regime has managed to put together semi-functional versions of that, but much of the work of the judiciary involves managing noncriminal disputes between litigants, and we can see that Slylock’s animal civilization has a long way to go in that department. Our boy Sly is using the only tool in his arsenal — ratiocination — and frankly I don’t think it’s really up to the task.

Mary Worth, 3/30/25

“Oh, Belle seems wacky, but kinda fun, ha ha!” is what many of you and frankly I thought when she first appeared. “She definitely won’t start blacking out the eyes of her lover’s daughter in family photos literally minutes after she arrives unannounced at his home, with a sharpie she apparently carries with her specifically for that purpose.” We were fools. Fools! How could we have been so naive?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/30/25

“When is this boring stalker storyline going to get to the medical content that we expect from medically-themed comic strip Rex Morgan, M.D.?” is the question that’s been on the lips of a lot of people who do not regularly read Rex Morgan, M.D., the comic strip that has a lot less medical content than you’d expect. Anyway, does dying count as medical content? Because our stalker — I assume that’s him, based on his Lincolnian profile — seems to have died in mid-stalk, oops. Well, looks like Summer’s problem is solved, anyway! I guess maybe we should bring Rex in to say a few words about how the stalking lifestyle is unhealthy and then move on.