Archive: Slylock Fox

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Hey, everybody! If you’ve enjoyed faithful reader Gold-Digging Nanny’s takes on Slylock Fox’s Six Differences, you no long have to hunt through the comments to find them. That’s because she now has her own blog dedicated to it! Behold, I Found All Six!

Also! I received yesterday an email from faithful reader Seth with a photo of him in his Molly the Bear shirt:

“I love this shirt,” says Seth, and who doesn’t. It’s probably the least in-jokey of all the Comics Curmudgeon merch, and anyone can enjoy it, so obviously you should buy eight or nine and give them to your whole family for Christmas.

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Cathy, 4/13/08

I know it’s not “cool” to admit to being amused by Cathy, but I have to say that wading through all that text to get to the final word balloon was really worth it today. If the thought of Cathy reduced to such penury that she can only quench her thirst by desperately licking at her own salty, salty tears doesn’t bring a smile to your face, then you have a heart of stone, my friend.

Hi and Lois, 4/13/08

High on the list of Things I Have Spent Too Much Time Thinking About This Sunday: Why is Hi unshaven in this comic? Is this to represent the many hours he’s spent fretting over the family taxes? But in the opening panels, he’s clearly just getting started, but still sports a Don Johnson-esque stubble. Does it instead indicate that on weekends he takes a more relaxed attitude towards facial hair? But then, would he still put on a shirt and tie to do his taxes in his home office? I WANT ANSWERS DARN IT.

Further down on the list, but still nagging: “Tax Bat,” what the hell.

Slylock Fox, 4/13/08

The answer to this puzzle, if you can’t read it, involves Slylock swimming over to that overturned car and breathing the air out of the tires. This seems a little dubious to me, not least because he’ll have to engage in paw-to-tentacle combat with that octopus, which appears to be getting amorous with the submerged vehicle. My proposed solution? Just limit Max’s air intake. I’m sure that a little oxygen deprivation won’t do his already feeble brain any harm.

Meanwhile, that huge-eyed baby beaver will be haunting my dreams for weeks. The fact that it’s reproduced four times makes the top quarter of this comic more terrifying than Eraserhead.

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Shoe, 4/6/08

And this week’s award for the most egregious waste of Sunday comic space goes to … today’s Shoe! In fact, this Sunday strip contains two separate bits that would make perfectly serviceable daily strips (and since this is Shoe, by “perfectly serviceable” I mean “composed of mildly joke-like material”). Panels two and three in the first row and panels one and three of the bottom row are self-contained and even mildly funny. Panel two of the bottom row at least contains the mildly amusing sign “If All Else Fails Sawbones”. The middle row, in contrast, contains no jokes, no setups for jokes, and no cute details worth looking at. They are a slap in the face of everyone who ever aspires to occupy one of the precious square inches of the comics page, because they basically say, “Ha ha! We’re Shoe, we’re never going away, and we don’t have to care.

Crankshaft, 4/6/08

Today’s Crankshaft similarly crams multiple jokes into a single strip, but at least they all get to the heart of the feature’s archetypical concerns:

  • Joke one, panels one and two: Crankshaft is disgusted by modern life.
  • Joke two, panels three and four: Someone treated Crankshaft with disregard, probably because he’s old and/or unpleasant.
  • Joke three, panels five and six: Crankshaft is old and sick, and probably dying.

Slylock Fox, 4/6/08

Wow, eBay scams? That doesn’t really strike me as Count Weirdly’s style. Usually he likes to harass his victims in person, presumably so he can giggle with girlish glee at their annoyance. The saddest thing about today’s strip is not that Slylock’s constant harassment has forced the poor Count to turn to cybercrime to get his kicks, but that this is the first time we’ve seen what appears to be Countess Weirdly, or maybe his mistress, or sister — or, anyway, a She-Weirdly of some kind — and she’s leading Slylock arm-in-arm to the scene of the crime. “Yes, officer, here he is! Now lock him away so this castle and its army of freaky critters will be mine, all mine! MUHAHAHAHA! Wait, did I say that last part aloud?”

That beaver in the “which two scenes are alike” puzzle is the smuggest rodent I’ve ever seen in my life. Meanwhile, the one submitted to the “your drawing” feature looks like it’s at the tail end of some kind of weeks-long mescaline binge.