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Hi and Lois, 3/13/23

You know, I’ve often wondered how lovable disheveled loser Thirsty manages to hold down his job at Foofram Industries, but today we learn that by sheer force of not giving a shit he’s not only gainfully employed but has an office with a door and little desk sign that cheerfully proclaims his drinking problem to anyone who wanders in. Mr. Foofram is completely powerless against Thirsty’s utter lack of shame, and frankly a lot of us could take some pointers from him.

Dennis the Menace, 3/13/23

You know, “menacing” is communal process: it requires one party to behave in a potentially menacing fashion and another party to perceive those actions as menacing. So Dennis can trot this stuff out all he wants but if everyone is just going to titter indulgently, it’s not menacing. He’s clearly hoping for a theological escalation that he simply isn’t going to get at this drippy liberal Episcopalian parish his parents drag him to every week.

Gil Thorp, 3/13/23

Every team needs two kinds of assistant coaches: one who yells specific things you need to do, and another one that just yells general compliments. And thanks to their big fundraiser, the Mudlarks can now afford both, who hold down coaching duties on the sideline while Gil goes and takes a 25-minute “smoke break”.

Slylock Fox, 3/13/23

I love that, instead of drawing anything relevant to the logic puzzle he’s giving his class, Sly has just drawn an elaborately lifelike portrait of Count Weirdly on the whiteboard. “Blah blah fingerprints blah blah LOOK AT THIS FACE,” he says. “THIS FACE IS ALWAYS GUITLY. ONCE YOU SEE THE FACE JUST WORK YOUR WAY BACKWARDS TO SOMETHING VAGUELY PLAUSIBLE THEN LOCK HIM UP.”

Mary Worth, 3/13/23

“Your furry friends … [Mary pauses, then has a panicked thought that Wilbur and Dawn might have fursonas she doesn’t know about] … Pierre and Libby?”

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Slylock Fox, 2/25/23

I have sadly accepted that we Slylock readers can never see past the horizon of whatever Event separates our human world from Slylock’s animal-ruled kingdom, but every once in a while we get a glimpse of a time quite close to it. Take today’s strip, for example. Now, this isn’t in the first heady post-revolutionary days, when statues of human heroes were torn down in spontaneous displays of victorious rage in front of cheering animal crowds. No, this is from the ensuing weeks or months, when those lesser H. sapiens culture heroes were methodically wiped from public spaces by the employees of the new regime. To these two dogs, the work has almost become routine at this point, but you have to imagine it was still satisfying.

Blondie, 2/25/23

OK, so … does Dagwood, and/or anyone involved in the production of the venerable syndicated newspaper comic strip Blondie, know what “an offer he can’t refuse” means in The Godfather, the movie this classic line is from? It means you get someone to do what you want by threatening them with physical violence. In the movie, Don Corleone strongarms a Hollywood proudcer to cast his godson in a movie by cutting off his beloved horse’s head and putting it in the producer’s bed. So, in this scenario, Dagwood is upset that this car salesman isn’t going to use Daisy’s brutal murder and mutilation to convince him that he has no choice but to buy a BMW M8 coupe for considerably more than its $134,000 MSRP, I guess? I know Dagwood only watches westerns, but I feel like someone needs to tell him he’s treading into dangerous territory here.

Shoe and Zits, 2/25/23

Are taxes the mechanism by which a democratic society pools its wealth in order to provide public services? Or are they a literal crime imposed on sovereign citizens by tyrants? Today’s comics are here to bring you both sides of the story!

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Slylock Fox, 2/21/23

So I guess these nightmare-bugs are supposed to be … termites? Or some other horrible bug that feasts on wood, but I’m not going to bother researching what that might be because I’d probably end up seeing actual photographs of these nightmares, which is definitely not something I’m up for. My point, though, is that clearly whatever sinister process granted sapience to the animals of the Slylockverse did so to even the very tiny and very gross among them. The question that today’s strip raises is whether these bugs, as part of their transformation, achieved human-scale proportions in defiance of the square-cube law, or if they remained tiny but their chefs carve bits of wood into miniature replicas of full-sized logs, as part of a elaborate culinary culture that we’re just getting a glimpse of here.

Pluggers, 2/21/23

Pluggers is, of course, a fundamentally sad text, a ongoing and often quite grim paean to a supposedly bygone set of mores. Today, however, may be the first panel I can remember in which the practice being held up as an object of nostalgic longing is just obviously, demonstrably worse than what we have now. “Oh, can you kids today block that creepy guy you work with on Instagram so he doesn’t post borderline sexual comments on every one of your selfies, and also complain to HR about him? In my day, if I didn’t want to know he was jerking off, I would have to just leave my phone off the hook so that he couldn’t call me and nobody could either, and also quit my job!”