Post Content

Slylock Fox, 2/13/23

This deceitful dog may be the one who’s putting the scam into action, but I don’t think he’s the mastermind behind it. Look at that dull, defeated face: that’s not the look of “Curses, my master plan, foiled!” so much as “Well, here I am, taking the fall once again because I thought I could make some easy money doing low-level crimes that I was assured I would not be prosecuted for.” And what exactly is the scam here? Is it “first we release the spiders into your house, then you pay us to kill the spiders?” It probably would’ve been better for Sly to have held off on arresting the guy until after part two, in my opinion.

Blondie, 2/13/23

I love the implication here that Claudia, despite sitting just inches away from these guys, has missed the entire context for this conversation, possibly because they started talking and then she retreated to her mind palace to escape the blather. And who can blame her!

Dustin, 2/13/23

Look, Ed, your wife is trying to muster up some enthusiasm for your twice-monthly hand job, can you just shut the fuck up for two minutes

Post Content

The Lockhorns, 2/6/23

A thing I like about The Lockhorns is that it’s a comic about a marriage that has spiraled into truly dark territory, but most of the individual strips aren’t necessarily about incandescent moments of hate. Instead, you just get a series of small disappointments that add up to a wasted life. Like, today, you have to imagine that Loretta got it into her head that they should be a tea family, or at least that they should try it out, and she went through the trouble of putting together a matching tea set, and now, on morning one, Leroy just stares dully into his cup and is like “enh, let’s not.” Devastating. Devastating! And the most devastating thing is that they can still devastate one another like this, without even thinking about it.

Slylock Fox, 2/6/23

I feel like Weirdly has honestly put more work into his alibi here than he usually does. “Who, me?” he says. “I just got back from bowling. Haven’t even bothered to put my ball away yet, and my phone still hasn’t fully recharged. I was just sitting down to get on the computer and hadn’t even had time to enter my password!” The boiling flask isn’t that suspicious to me, it’s not like Weirdly has ever given the vibe of being really concerned about safety so he could’ve just left it boiling while he was out, or left one of his menagerie in charge of it, like the purple thing or the [record scratch] WAIT HOLD ON A SECOND COURT WEIRDLY HAS A MAX-ANALOGUE SIDEKICK? With the same color/dress scheme except he’s like … a tiny canid predator of some sort? Is that a small fox, specifically chosen to taunt Slylock? More on this story as it develops.

Pluggers, 2/6/23

It’s hard to get more Pluggers that today’s Pluggers, in which a plugger looks more smug than you can possibly imagine after completing a basic task that used to be something everyone did and now is something that nobody actually needs to do.

Shoe, 2/6/23

It looks like, after literally years of me demanding that Shoe start doing jokes that play off the strip’s basic premise, which is that all the characters are birds, that they finally did one. Honestly, I feel nothing about this. Nothing at all. This should be a big day for me, and yet: nothing. Going to go somewhere quiet where I can contemplate what I’m doing with my life for a bit.

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 1/23/23

Maybe I’m going to get pushback for this by people who are and/or know actual teens, but my take on vaping, setting aside for the moment its purpose as a drug delivery system, is that it’s one of the dorkiest things I encounter in the real world on a regular basis. You’re sucking cotton-candy flavored mist out of an object that looks either like a tiny alto saxophone or something that would’ve been called a “deathstick” in a bad late ’90s cyberpunk movie. Not that a teen should take lessons on being cool from me, a 48-year-old man who blogs about comic strips, but it’s just sad that the Magic the Gathering nerds have internalized that vaping is too cool for them. To be fair, Nick refuses to buy into this dichotomy either, and is happy to share his cool guy vaping bounty with them. Nick seems like an all right dude, to be honest, maintaining his generosity despite the nerds’ rudeness!

Slylock Fox, 1/23/23

For some reason I assumed that the answer to “which way” was going to be a cardinal direction and I was about to pen a screed about how the liberal coastal elitists at Slylock Fox have constructed a mystery where you have to know about the relative locations of the zoo and lake in Central Park. But it turns out the answer relies on knowing which side of the bus the doors are on, and as a transit nerd I’m down with this one.

Honestly, the biggest story here is not Harry Ape robbing yet another bank, but the continued existence of a zoo in a post-animalpocalypse world. I suppose the animals could maintain it with empty cages and habitats as a monument to their former enslavement, but there are other possibilities, and they’re all much darker.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/23/23

You know, for someone who’s dirt poor and also doesn’t really seem to care about living a healthy lifestyle, Snuffy sure visits the doctor a lot! And it occurred to me, looking at this strip, that we often see him in that situation with his shirt off and the top half of his overalls unbuckled, which (a) indicates that a decent amount of thought went into the question of “Given how Snuffy canonically dresses, what would it look like if he had to disrobe?” and (b) is really a blessing, considering how much further they could’ve gone with it.