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Gil Thorp, 6/6/22

Look, folks, I’ve never claimed to be particularly “baseball savvy,” so I apologize for failing to follow Saturday’s disjointed jargon about Ryne Duren. (Just as a side note, faithful reader/Twitter follower Windier E. Megatons pointed out that Ryne Duren is a classic guy for the Let’s Remember Some Guys genre of sport talk, which you’d think Gil Thorp would engage in more often.) Apparently the point was not that “You should get better glasses, like Ryne Duren did” but rather that “Now that your opponents know your vision is poor, you should ham it up and make it seem like you have very little control, like Ryne Duren did, so that they’re terrified you’re going to ‘accidentally’ murder them with a fastball to the face, something that a coach at the high school level would definitely just let happen.” Remember, kids, using a series of elaborate coded signals to compensate for your disability is the pusillanimous tactic of an effeminate coward and violates the rules of baseball. But pretending to be a true psycho/major legal liability for your school district? That’s all the game, fellas.

Slylock Fox, 6/6/22

A thing that I have noticed in my many years of Slylock Fox studies is that a great many of the “mysteries” simply involve a sapient animal who has been caught in some wrongdoing offering a transparently false alibi that Slylock easily sees through. Today it occurs to me that one of the things that distinguishes humans from (present-day) animals is our ability to imagine counterfactuals: ways that events could have, but did not, play out, or, alternately, explanations that we know to be false for actual events. Perhaps part of the great Animalpocalypse was the non-humans’ sudden ability to dream up counterfactuals of their own, but being so new to them, they find them difficult to refute. Only Slylock, one of the wisest of the new breed of animals, is able to keep is bearings on reality in this brave new world.

Pardon My Planet, 6/6/22

The comics pages are a small-c conservative institution heavily invested traditional institutions like the nuclear family. Only truly radical strips like Pardon My Planet are willing to speak the unpopular truth: raising children is exactly like your soul being condemned for your sins and tortured forever, in hell.

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Daddy Daze, 5/21/22

I generally think of piles of leaves as pretty ephemeral things, but apparently the one next to the Daddy Daze Daddy’s house has been there mouldering and rotting long enough that he expects his ex, who does not (and perhaps never did?) live there, to know about it, which may say a lot about why they broke up.

Funky Winkerbean, 5/21/22

THE COMIC STRIP MARVIN [juvenile, anti-intellectual]: Haw haw, this baby peed in his diaper!

THE COMIC STRIP FUNKY WINKERBEAN [imparting profound, soul-burdening wisdom]: Someday — perhaps someday soon — you will grow old and die, and as part of that process, you will inevitably piss yourself, so you’d better buy some diapers now to prepare.

Dick Tracy, 5/21/22

“I’ve decide to go by a norman human name and stop dressing in impractical knight’s garb so I cHAHA JUST KIDDING I’M A DICK TRACY CHARACTER, THIS IS OUR ENTIRE DEAL”

Slylock Fox, 5/21/22

Slylock Fox’s Which Two Scenes Are Exactly Alike? Presents: FRANKENBART: The Frankenstein Made Out Of Bart Simpsons’ Corpse

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Slylock Fox, 5/16/22

My intense study of the post-animalpocalypse world of Slylock Fox has been ongoing for sixteen years now, but every day we are still learning new things about how this society works. For instance, as we humans understand law and justice, Slylock is surely an agent of the government: he works directly for high regime officials, and has the authority to both investigate and prosecute crimes. Yet here we see him in the process of investigating insurance fraud, something that in our own economic system would be considered a civil matter. This hints that their government and law enforcement have a broader reach than ours do: maybe the regime believes they have an obligation to protect corporate bodies against harm just as they protect animal citizens against violence, or perhaps the insurance industry is itself wholly state-run rather than in the hands of private entities. These are rich avenues for study and more than justify the renewal of my academic research grant, so hopefully that check will be coming my way soon.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/16/22

Sometimes, when you’re the producer of a media product that’s been running literally since the Wilson Administration and whose whole main shtick is a fairly problematic series of running jokes at the expense of some of America’s most economically desperate citizens, you need to spend a week or so getting new readers up to speed on your characters and letting them know why they should care about them. For instance, did you know that Snuffy Smith refuses to help around the house, and is also deeply in debt? Tune in this week for eight more endearing (?) facts about this dwarfish, potato-nosed rascal!

Pluggers, 5/16/22

Pluggers cannot bat away the constant, intrusive thoughts about death, because they’re aging and physically declining and will themselves be dead soon. That’s it! That’s the whole joke!